The Holocaust
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The Holocaust (from the
The persecution and genocide were carried out in stages. Various
Every arm of Nazi Germany's
Etymology and use of the term
The term holocaust comes from the
The biblical word Shoah (שואה) (also spelled Sho'ah and Shoa), meaning "calamity", became the standard Hebrew term for the Holocaust as early as the 1940s, especially in Europe and Israel.[16] Shoah is preferred by many Jews for a number of reasons, including the theologically offensive nature of the word "holocaust", which they take to refer to the Greek pagan custom.[17]
The Nazis used a euphemistic phrase, the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" (German: Endlösung der Judenfrage), and the phrase "Final Solution" has been widely used as a term for the genocide of the Jews subsequently. Nazis also used the euphemism, “Leben unwertes Leben” or Life unworthy of life in an attempt to justify the killings philosophically.
Distinctive features
Institutional collaboration
Saul Friedländer writes that: "Not one social group, not one religious community, not one scholarly institution or professional association in Germany and throughout Europe declared its solidarity with the Jews."[19] He writes that some Christian churches declared that converted Jews should be regarded as part of the flock, but even then only up to a point.
Friedländer argues that this makes the Holocaust distinctive because antisemitic policies were able to unfold without the interference of countervailing forces of the kind normally found in advanced societies, such as industry, small businesses, churches, and other vested interests and lobby groups.[19]
Ideology and scale
In other genocides, pragmatic considerations such as control of territory and resources were central to the genocide policy. Yehuda Bauer argues that:
The basic motivation [of the Holocaust] was purely ideological, rooted in an illusionary world of Nazi imagination, where an international Jewish conspiracy to control the world was opposed to a parallel Aryan quest. No genocide to date had been based so completely on myths, on hallucinations, on abstract, nonpragmatic ideology– which was then executed by very rational, pragmatic means."[20]
Responding to the German philosopher Ernst Nolte, who claimed that the Holocaust was not unique, the German historian Eberhard Jäckel wrote in 1986 that the Holocaust was unique because:
the National Socialist killing of the Jews was unique in that never before had a state with the authority of its responsible leader decided and announced that a specific human group, including its aged, its women and its children and infants, would be killed as quickly as possible, and then carried through this resolution using every possible means of state power.[21]
The slaughter was systematically conducted in virtually all areas of
Anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was to be exterminated without exception. In other genocides, people were able to escape death by converting to another religion or in some other way assimilating. This option was not available to the Jews of occupied Europe,[24] unless their grandparents had converted before January 18, 1871. All persons of recent Jewish ancestry were to be exterminated in lands controlled by Germany.[25]
Extermination camps
The use of camps equipped with gas chambers for the purpose of systematic mass extermination of peoples was a unique feature of the Holocaust and unprecedented in history. Never before in history had there existed places with the express purpose of killing people en masse.
Medical experiments
Another distinctive feature of the Holocaust was the extensive use of human subjects in medical experiments. German physicians carried out such experiments at
The most notorious of these physicians was Dr.
He seemed particularly keen on working with Romani children. He would bring them sweets and toys, and personally take them to the gas chamber. They would call him "Onkel Mengele".[28] Vera Alexander was a Jewish inmate at Auschwitz who looked after 50 sets of Romani twins:
I remember one set of twins in particular: Guido and Ina, aged about four. One day, Mengele took them away. When they returned, they were in a terrible state: they had been sewn together, back to back, like
Development and execution
Origins
The second half of the 19th century saw the emergence in
The tremendous scientific and technological changes in Germany of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, together with the growth of the welfare state, created widespread hopes that "utopia" was at hand and that soon all social problems could be solved.[41] At the same time, owing to the great prestige of science, a scientific racist, social Darwinist and eugenicist world-view which declared some people to be more biologically "valuable" than others was common amongst German elites.[42] The historian Detlev Peukert in his 1989 essay "The Genesis of the 'Final Solution' from the Spirit of Science" declared that the Shoah was not the result solely of anti-Semitism, but was instead a product of the "cumulative radicalization" in which "numerous smaller currents" fed into the "broad current" that led to genocide.[43] After the First World War, the pre-war mood of optimism gave way to disillusionment as German bureaucrats found social problems to be more insoluble than previously thought, which in turn led them to place increasing emphasis on saving the biologically "fit" while the biologically "unfit" were to be written off.[44] The economic strains caused by the Great Depression had led to many in the German medical establishment to advocate with increasing vigor the idea of selective killings of the "incurable" mentally and physically disabled as a cost-saving measure in order to free up money to care for the curable.[45] Thus by the time the Nazis had come to power in 1933, a huge boost was given to the already existing tendency in German social policy to save the racially "valuable" while seeking to rid society of the racially "undesirable".[46]
The persecution and exodus of Germany's 525,000 Jews began almost as soon as the Nazis came to power on January 30, 1933. In Mein Kampf, Hitler had been open about his hatred of Jews, and gave ample warning of his intention to drive them from Germany's political, intellectual, and cultural life. He did not write that he would attempt to exterminate them, but he is reported to have been more explicit in private. As early as 1922, he allegedly told Major Joseph Hell, at the time a journalist:
Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews. As soon as I have the power to do so, I will have gallows built in rows– at the Marienplatz in Munich, for example– as many as traffic allows. Then the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately, and they will remain hanging until they stink; they will hang there as long as the principles of hygiene permit. As soon as they have been untied, the next batch will be strung up, and so on down the line, until the last Jew in Munich has been exterminated. Other cities will follow suit, precisely in this fashion, until all Germany has been completely cleansed of Jews.[47]
The German historian Hans Mommsen claimed that there were three types of anti-Semitism in Germany:
One should differentiate between the cultural antisemitism symptomatic of the German conservatives — found especially in the German officer corps and the high civil administration — and mainly directed against the Eastern Jews on the one hand, and völkisch antisemitism on the other. The conservative variety functions, as Shulamit Volkov has pointed out, as something of a "cultural code." This variety of German antisemitism later on played a significant role insofar as it prevented the functional elite from distancing itself from the repercussions of racial antisemitism. Thus, there was almost no relevant protest against the Jewish persecution on the part of the generals or the leading groups within the Reich government. This is especially true with respect to Hitler's proclamation of the "racial annihilation war" against the Soviet Union.
Besides conservative antisemitism, there existed in Germany a rather silent anti-Judaism within the Catholic Church, which had a certain impact on immunising the Catholic population against the escalating persecution. The famous protest of the Catholic Church against the euthanasia program was, therefore, not accompanied by any protest against the Holocaust.
The third and most vitriolic variety of antisemitism in Germany (and elsewhere) is the so-called völkisch antisemitism or racism, and this is the foremost advocate of using violence. Anyhow, one has to be aware that even Hitler until 1938 and possibly 1939 still relied on enforced emigration to get rid of German Jewry; and there did not yet exist any clear-cut concept of killing them. This, however, does not mean that the Nazis elsewhere on all levels did not hesitate to use violent methods, and the inroads against Jews, Jewish shops, and institutions show that very clearly. But there did not exist any formal annihilation program until the second year of the war. It came into being after the "reservation" projects had failed. That, however, does not mean that those methods did not include a lethal component.[48]
Legal repression and emigration
Right from the beginning of the Third Reich, Nazi leaders had proclaimed the existence of a Volksgemeinschaft (People's Community). Nazi policies divided the population into two categories, the Volksgenossen ("National Comrades") who belonged to the Volksgemeinschaft and the Gemeinschaftsfremde ("Community Aliens") who did not. Nazi policies about repression divided into three types of enemies, the "racial" enemies such as the Jews and the Gypsies who were viewed as enemies because of their "blood"; political opponents such as Marxists, liberals, Christians and the "reactionaries" who were viewed as wayward "National Comrades"; and moral opponents such as homosexuals, the "work-shy" and habitual criminals, also seen as wayward "National Comrades".[49] The last two groups were to be sent to concentration camps for "re-education", with the aim of eventual absorption into the Volksgemeinschaft, though some of the moral opponents were to be sterilized as they were regarded as "genetically inferior".[49] "Racial" enemies such as the Jews could, by definition, never belong to the Volksgemeinschaft, thus requiring their total removal from society.[49] The German historian Detlev Peukert wrote that the National Socialists' "goal was an utopian Volksgemeinschaft, totally under police surveillance, in which any attempt at nonconformist behaviour, or even any hint or intention of such behaviour, would be visited with terror".[50] In support of this, Peukert quoted policy documents on the "Treatment of Community Aliens" from 1944, which (though never implemented) showed the full intentions of Nazi social policy: "persons who ... show themselves [to be] unable to comply by their own efforts with the minimum requirements of the national community" were to be placed under police supervision, and if this did not reform them, they were to be taken to a concentration camp.[51]
Leading up to the March 1933 Reichstag elections, the Nazis intensified their campaign of violence against the opposition. With the co-operation of local authorities, they set up concentration camps for extrajudicial imprisonment of their opponents. One of the first was Dachau, which opened in March 1933. These early camps were meant for political prisoners only, such as Communists and Social Democrats, and were not killing centres like the latter death camps.[52] Other early prisons– for example, basements and storehouses run by the SA and less commonly by SS – were consolidated by mid-1934 into purpose-built camps outside the cities, exclusively run by the SS. The main purposes of the concentration camps was to serve as a deterrent by terrorizing those Germans who were unable or unwilling to join the Volksgemeinschaft in conformity[53] Those sent to the concentration camps were in turn divided into the "educable" whose wills could be broken into becoming "National Comrades" and the "biologically depraved" were to be sterilized, were to be held permanently, and over time were increasingly subject to "annihilation through labour", i.e. being worked to death[53]
A self-respecting nation cannot, on a scale accepted up to now, leave its higher activities in the hands of people of racially foreign origin ... Allowing the presence of too high a percentage of people of foreign origin in relation to their percentage in the general population could be interpreted as an acceptance of the superiority of other races, something decidedly to be rejected.[56]
In July 1933, the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring calling for compulsory sterilization of the "inferior" was passed. This major eugenic policy led to over 200 Hereditary Health Courts ([Erbgesundheitsgerichte] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help)) being set up, under whose rulings over 400,000 people were sterilized against their will during the Nazi period.[57]
In 1935, Hitler introduced the
Jewish intellectuals were among the first to leave. The philosopher
Kristallnacht (1938)
On November 7, 1938, Jewish minor
After these pogroms, Jewish emigration from Nazi Germany accelerated, while public Jewish life in Germany ceased to exist.[63]
Resettlement and deportation
Before the war, the Nazis considered mass exportation of German (and subsequently the European) Jewry from Europe. Plans to reclaim former German colonies such as Tanganyika and South West Africa for Jewish resettlement were halted by Hitler, who argued that no place where "so much blood of heroic Germans had been spilled" should be made available as a residence for the "worst enemies of the Germans".[67] Diplomatic efforts were undertaken to convince the other former colonial powers, primarily the United Kingdom and France, to accept expelled Jews in their colonies.[68] Areas considered for possible resettlement included British Palestine,[69] Italian Abyssinia,[69] British Rhodesia,[70] French Madagascar,[69] and Australia.[71]
Of these areas, Madagascar was the most seriously discussed. Heydrich called the Madagascar Plan a "territorial final solution"; it was a remote location, and the island's unfavorable conditions would hasten deaths.[72] In retrospect, although futile, this plan did constitute an important psychological step on the path to the Holocaust.[73] Approved by Hitler in 1938, the resettlement planning was carried out by Eichmann's office, only being abandoned once the mass killing of Jews began in 1941. The end of the Madagascar Plan was announced on February 10, 1942. The German Foreign Office was given the official explanation that, due to the war with the Soviet Union, Jews were to be "sent to the east".[74]
Palestine was the only location to which any Nazi relocation plan succeeded in producing significant results, by means of an agreement begun in 1933 between the Zionist Federation of Germany (die Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland) and the Nazi government, the Haavara Agreement. This agreement resulted in the transfer of about 60,000 German Jews and $100 million from Germany to Palestine, up until the outbreak of World War II.[75]
Early measures
In German occupied Poland
The question of the treatment of the Jews became an urgent one for the Nazis after September 1939, when they
Himmler's right-hand man, Reinhard Heydrich, recommended concentrating all the Polish Jews in ghettos in major cities, where they would be put to work for the German war industry. The ghettos would be in cities located on railway junctions, so that, in Heydrich's words, "future measures can be accomplished more easily."[76] During his interrogation in 1961, Adolf Eichmann testified that the expression "future measures" was understood to mean "physical extermination."[76]
I ask nothing of the Jews except that they should disappear.
— Hans Frank, Nazi governor of Poland.[77]
In September, Himmler appointed Heydrich head of the
Although it was clear by 1941 that the SS hierarchy was determined to embark on a policy of killing all the Jews under German control, there was still opposition to this policy within the Nazi regime, although the motive was economic, not
In other occupied countries
When Nazi Germany occupied Norway, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, and France in 1940, and Yugoslavia and Greece in 1941, anti-Semitic measures were also introduced into these countries, although the pace and severity varied greatly from country to country according to local political circumstances. Jews were removed from economic and cultural life and were subject to various restrictive laws, but physical deportation did not occur in most places before 1942. The Vichy regime in occupied France actively collaborated in persecuting French Jews. Germany's allies Italy, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Finland were pressured to introduce antisemitic measures, but for the most part they did not comply until compelled to do so. The German puppet regime in Croatia, on the other hand, began actively persecuting Jews on its own initiative.[citation needed]
General Government and Lublin reservation (Nisko plan)
On September 28, 1939, Germany gained control over the Lublin area through the
In July 1940, due to the difficulties of supporting the increased population in the
In October 1940, Gauleiters
During 1940 and 1941, murder of large numbers of Jews in German-occupied Poland continued, and the deportation of Jews to the
Concentration and labor camps (1933–1945)
From the beginning of the Third Reich
Upon admission, some camps
Ghettos (1940–1945)
After the
From 1940 through 1942, starvation and disease, especially
The Germans came, the police, and they started banging houses: "Raus, raus, raus, Juden raus." ... [O]ne baby started to cry ... The other baby started crying. So the mother urinated in her hand and gave the baby a drink to keep quiet ... [When the police had gone], I told the mothers to come out. And one baby was dead ... from fear, the mother [had] choked her own baby.
— Abraham Malik, describing his experience in the Kovno Ghetto.[94]
Each ghetto was run by a Judenrat (Jewish council) of German-appointed Jewish community leaders, who were responsible for the day-to-day running of the ghetto, including the distribution of food, water, heat, medicine, and shelter, and who were also expected to make arrangements for deportations to extermination camps. Himmler ordered the start of the deportations on July 19, 1942, and three days later, on July 22, the deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto began; over the next 52 days, until September 12, 300,000 people from Warsaw alone were transported in freight trains to the Treblinka extermination camp. Many other ghettos were completely depopulated.
Berenbaum writes that the defining moment that tested the courage and character of each Judenrat came when they were asked to provide a list of names of the next group to be deported. The Judenrat members went through the tried and tested methods of delay, bribery, stonewalling, pleading, and argumentation, until finally a decision had to be made. Some, like
The first
Pogroms (1939–1942)
A number of deadly
Death squads (1941–1943)
The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 opened a new phase. The Holocaust intensified after the Nazis occupied Lithuania, where close to 80% of
Members of the local populations in certain occupied Soviet territories participated actively in the killings of Jews and others.[100] In Lithuania, Latvia and western Ukraine, locals were deeply involved in the murder of Jews from the very beginning of the German occupation.[100] The Latvian Arajs Kommando was an example of an auxiliary unit involved in these killings.[100] To the south, Ukrainians killed approximately 24,000 Jews.[100] In addition, Latvian and Lithuanian units left their own countries, and committed murders of Jews in Belarus, and Ukrainians served as concentration and death camp guards in Poland.[100] Ustaše militia in Croatian areas also carried out acts of persecution and murder. Ultimately it was the Germans who organized and channelled these local participants in the Holocaust.[100]
Many of the mass killings were carried out in public, a change from previous practice.[100] German witnesses to these killings emphasized the participation of the locals.[100] The massacres committed by the Einsatzgruppen were usually justified under the grounds of anti-partisan or anti-bandit operations, but the German historian Andreas Hillgruber wrote that this was merely an excuse for the German Army's considerable involvement in the Holocaust in Russia and the terms "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity" were indeed correct labels for what happened.[101] Hillgruber maintained that the slaughter of about 2.2 million defenceless men, women and children for the reasons of racist ideology cannot possibly be justified for any reason, and that those German generals who claimed that the Einsatzgruppen were a necessary anti-partisan response were lying.[102]
Army co-operation with the SS in anti-partisan and anti-Jewish operations was close and intensive.
The action, first scheduled as a training exercise was carried out under real-life conditions (ernstfallmässig) in the village itself. Strangers, especially partisans could not be found. The screening of the population, however resulted in 13 Jews, 27 Jewish women and 11 Jewish children, of which 13 Jews and 19 Jewish women were shot in co-operation with the Security Service[106]
Based on what they had learned during the Mogilev seminar, one Wehrmacht officer told his men "Where the partisan is, there is the Jew and where the Jew is, there is the partisan".[105] In Order #24 of November 24, 1941, the commander of the 707th division declared:
Jews and Gypsies:...As already has been ordered, the Jews have to vanish from the flat country and the Gypsies have to be annihilated too. The carrying out of larger Jewish actions is not the task of the divisional units. They are carried out by civilian or police authorities, if necessary ordered by the commandant of White Ruthenia, if he has special units at his disposal, or for security reasons and in the case of collective punishments. When smaller or larger groups of Jews are met in the flat country, they can be liquidated by divisional units or be massed in the ghettos near bigger villages designated for that purpose, where they can be handed over to the civilian authority or the SD.[107]
The German historian Jürgen Förster, a leading expert on the subject of Wehrmacht war crimes argued the Wehrmacht played a key role in the Holocaust, and it is wrong to describe the Shoah as solely the work of the SS with the Wehrmacht as a passive and disapproving bystander.[108]
Raul Hilberg writes that the German Einsatzgruppen commanders were ordinary citizens; the great majority were university-educated professionals.[109] They used their skills to become efficient killers, according to Michael Berenbaum.[110]
The large-scale killings of Jews in the occupied Soviet territories was assigned to SS formations called Einsatzgruppen ("task groups"), under the overall command of Heydrich. These had been used on a limited scale in Poland in 1939, but were now organized on a much larger scale. Einsatzgruppe A was assigned to the Baltic area, Einsatzgruppe B to Belarus, Einsatzgruppe C to north and central Ukraine, and Einsatzgruppe D to Moldova, south Ukraine, the Crimea, and, during 1942, the north Caucasus.[111]
According to Ohlendorf at
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum tells the story of one survivor of the Einsatzgruppen in
:I saw them do the killing. At 5:00 p.m. they gave the command, "Fill in the pits." Screams and groans were coming from the pits. Suddenly I saw my neighbor Ruderman rise from under the soil ... His eyes were bloody and he was screaming: "Finish me off!" ... A murdered woman lay at my feet. A boy of five years crawled out from under her body and began to scream desperately. "Mommy!" That was all I saw, since I fell unconscious.[110]
The most notorious massacre of Jews in the Soviet Union was at a ravine called
On Monday the Jews of Kiev gathered by the cemetery, expecting to be loaded onto trains. The crowd was large enough that most of the men, women, and children could not have known what was happening until it was too late: by the time they heard the machine-gun fire, there was no chance to escape. All were driven down a corridor of soldiers, in groups of ten, and then shot. A truck driver described the scene, as
one after the other, they had to remove their luggage, then their coats, shoes, and outer garments and also underwear ... Once undressed, they were led into the ravine which was about 150 meters long and 30 meters wide and a good 15 meters deep ... When they reached the bottom of the ravine they were seized by members of the Schutzpolizei and made to lie down on top of Jews who had already been shot ... The corpses were literally in layers. A police marksman came along and shot each Jew in the neck with a submachine gun ... I saw these marksmen stand on layers of corpses and shoot one after the other ... The marksman would walk across the bodies of the executed Jews to the next Jew, who had meanwhile lain down, and shoot him.[112]
In August 1941 Himmler travelled to Minsk, where he personally witnessed 100 Jews being shot in a ditch outside the town, an event described by Karl Wolff in his diary. "Himmler's face was green. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his cheek where a piece of brain had squirted up onto it. Then he vomited." After recovering his composure, he lectured the SS men on the need to follow the "highest moral law of the Party" in carrying out their tasks.
New methods of mass murder
Starting in December 1939, the Nazis introduced new methods of mass murder by using gas.
A need for new mass murder techniques was also expressed by Hans Frank, governor of the General Government, who noted that this many people could not be simply shot. "We shall have to take steps, however, designed in some way to eliminate them." It was this problem which led the SS to experiment with large-scale killings using poison gas. Finally, Christian Wirth seems to have been the inventor of the gas chamber.
Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution (1942–1945)
By the end of 1941, Himmler was becoming increasingly impatient with the progress of the Final Solution. His main opponent was Göring, who had succeeded in exempting Jewish industrial workers from the orders to deport all Jews to the General Government and who had allied himself with the Army commanders who were opposing the extermination of the Jews out of a mixture of economic calculation, distaste for the
Heydrich therefore convened the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942 in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to finalize a plan for the extermination of the Jews.
A plan was presented for killing all the Jews in Europe, including 330,000 Jews in England and 4,000 in Ireland,[119] although the minutes taken by Eichmann refer to this only through euphemisms, such as " ... emigration has now been replaced by evacuation to the East. This operation should be regarded only as a provisional option, though in view of the coming final solution of the Jewish question it is already supplying practical experience of vital importance."[119]
The officials were told there were 2.3 million Jews in the General Government, 850,000 in Hungary, 1.1 million in the other occupied countries, and up to 5 million in the USSR, although 2 million of these were in areas still under Soviet control — a total of about 6.5 million. These would all be transported by train to extermination camps (Vernichtungslager) in Poland, where almost all of them would be gassed at once. In some camps, such as Auschwitz, those fit for work would be kept alive for a while, but eventually all would be killed. Göring's representative, Dr. Erich Neumann, gained a limited exemption for some classes of industrial workers.
German public reaction
In his 1983 book, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich, Ian Kershaw examined the Alltagsgeschichte (history of everyday life) in Bavaria during the Nazi period.[120] Describing the attitudes of most Bavarians, Kershaw argued that the most common viewpoint was indifference towards what was happening to the Jews.[121] Kershaw argued that most Bavarians were vaguely aware of the Shoah, but were vastly more concerned about the war than about the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question".[121] Kershaw made the claim that "the road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference".[122][123]
Kershaw's assessment that most Bavarians, and by implication most Germans, were indifferent to the Shoah faced criticism from the Israeli historian Otto Dov Kulka, an expert on public opinion in Nazi Germany, and the Canadian historian Michael Kater. Kater contended that Kershaw downplayed the extent of popular antisemitism, and that though admitting that most of the "spontaneous" antisemitic actions of Nazi Germany were staged, argued that because these actions involved substantial numbers of Germans, it is wrong to see the extreme antisemitism of the Nazis as coming solely from above.[124] Kulka argued that most Germans were more anti-Semitic than Kershaw portrayed them in Popular Opinion and Political Dissent, and that rather than "indifference", "passive complicity" would be a better term to describe the reaction of the German people.[125]
In a study focusing only on the views about Jews of Germans opposed to the Nazi regime, the German historian Christof Dipper in his 1983 essay "Der Deutsche Widerstand und die Juden" (translated into English as "The German Resistance and the Jews" in Yad Vashem Studies, Volume 16, 1984) argued that the majority of the anti-Nazi national-conservatives were antisemitic.[126] Dipper wrote that for the majority of the national-conservatives "the bureaucratic, pseudo-legal deprivation of the Jews practiced until 1938 was still considered acceptable".[126] Though Dipper noted no one in the German resistance supported the Holocaust, he also commented that the national-conservatives did not intend to restore civil rights to the Jews after the planned overthrow of Hitler.[126] Dipper went on to argue that, based on such views held by opponents of the regime, "a large part of the German people...believed that a "Jewish Question" existed and had to be solved...".[126]
Motivation
In his 1965 essay "Command and Compliance", which originated in his work as an expert witness for the prosecution at the
In his 1992 book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland,
The Russian historian Sergei Kudryashov studied the guards trained at the
Extermination camps
Camp name | Killed | Coordinates | Ref. |
---|---|---|---|
Auschwitz II | 1,000,000 | 50°2′9″N 19°10′42″E / 50.03583°N 19.17833°E | [137][138][139] |
Belzec | 600,000 | 50°22′18″N 23°27′27″E / 50.37167°N 23.45750°E | [140][141] |
Chełmno | 320,000 | 52°9′27″N 18°43′43″E / 52.15750°N 18.72861°E | [142][143] |
Jasenovac | 58–97,000 | 45°16′54″N 16°56′6″E / 45.28167°N 16.93500°E | [144][145] |
Majdanek
|
360,000 | 51°13′13″N 22°36′0″E / 51.22028°N 22.60000°E | [146][147] |
Maly Trostinets
|
65,000 | 53°51′4″N 27°42′17″E / 53.85111°N 27.70472°E | [148][149] |
Sobibor | 250,000 | 51°26′50″N 23°35′37″E / 51.44722°N 23.59361°E | [150][151] |
Treblinka | 870,000 | 52°37′35″N 22°2′49″E / 52.62639°N 22.04694°E | [152][153] |
During 1942, in addition to Auschwitz, five other camps were designated as extermination camps (Vernichtungslager) for the carrying out of the
Extermination camps are frequently confused with concentration camps such as
There was a place called the ramp where the trains with the Jews were coming in. They were coming in day and night, and sometimes one per day and sometimes five per day ... Constantly, people from the heart of Europe were disappearing, and they were arriving to the same place with the same ignorance of the fate of the previous transport. And the people in this mass ... I knew that within a couple of hours ... ninety percent would be gassed.
The extermination camps were run by SS officers, but most of the guards were Ukrainian or Baltic auxiliaries. Regular German soldiers were kept well away.
Gas chambers
At the extermination camps with gas chambers all the prisoners arrived by train. Sometimes entire trainloads were sent straight to the gas chambers, but usually the camp doctor on duty subjected individuals to selections, where a small percentage were deemed fit to work in the slave labor camps; the majority were taken directly from the platforms to a reception area where all their clothes and other possessions were seized by the Nazis to help fund the war. They were then herded naked into the gas chambers. Usually they were told these were showers or delousing chambers, and there were signs outside saying "baths" and "sauna." They were sometimes given a small piece of soap and a towel so as to avoid panic, and were told to remember where they had put their belongings for the same reason. When they asked for water because they were thirsty after the long journey in the cattle trains, they were told to hurry up, because coffee was waiting for them in the camp, and it was getting cold.[157]
According to
The gas was then pumped out, the bodies were removed (which would take up to four hours), gold fillings in their teeth were extracted with pliers by dentist prisoners, and women's hair was cut.[161] The floor of the gas chamber was cleaned, and the walls whitewashed.[160] The work was done by the Sonderkommando, which were work units of Jewish prisoners. In crematoria 1 and 2, the Sonderkommando lived in an attic above the crematoria; in crematoria 3 and 4, they lived inside the gas chambers.[162] When the Sonderkommando had finished with the bodies, the SS conducted spot checks to make sure all the gold had been removed from the victims' mouths. If a check revealed that gold had been missed, the Sonderkommando prisoner responsible was thrown into the furnace alive as punishment.[163]
At first, the bodies were buried in deep pits and covered with lime, but between September and November 1942, on the orders of Himmler, they were dug up and burned. In the spring of 1943, new gas chambers and crematoria were built to accommodate the numbers.[164]
Another improvement we made over Treblinka was that we built our gas chambers to accommodate 2,000 people at one time, whereas at Treblinka their 10 gas chambers only accommodated 200 people each. The way we selected our victims was as follows: we had two SS doctors on duty at Auschwitz to examine the incoming transports of prisoners. The prisoners would be marched by one of the doctors who would make spot decisions as they walked by. Those who were fit for work were sent into the Camp. Others were sent immediately to the extermination plants. Children of tender years were invariably exterminated, since by reason of their youth they were unable to work. Still another improvement we made over Treblinka was that at Treblinka the victims almost always knew that they were to be exterminated and at Auschwitz we endeavored to fool the victims into thinking that they were to go through a delousing process. Of course, frequently they realized our true intentions and we sometimes had riots and difficulties due to that fact. Very frequently women would hide their children under the clothes but of course when we found them we would send the children in to be exterminated. We were required to carry out these exterminations in secrecy but of course the foul and nauseating stench from the continuous burning of bodies permeated the entire area and all of the people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going on at Auschwitz.
—Rudolf Höß, Auschwitz camp commandant, Nuremberg testimony.[165]
Jewish resistance
Yehuda Bauer and other historians argue that resistance consisted not only of physical opposition, but of any activity that gave the Jews dignity and humanity in humiliating and inhumane conditions.[166]
In every ghetto, in every deportation train, in every labor camp, even in the death camps, the will to resist was strong, and took many forms. Fighting with the few weapons that would be found, individual acts of defiance and protest, the courage of obtaining food and water under the threat of death, the superiority of refusing to allow the Germans their final wish to gloat over panic and despair. Even passivity was a form of resistance. To die with dignity was a form of resistance. To resist the demoralizing, brutalizing force of evil, to refuse to be reduced to the level of animals, to live through the torment, to outlive the tormentors, these too were acts of resistance. Merely to give a witness of these events in testimony was, in the end, a contribution to victory. Simply to survive was a victory of the human spirit."
— Martin Gilbert. The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy.[167]
There are many examples of Jewish resistance, most notably the
An estimated 20,000 to 30,000
In occupied Poland and Soviet territories, thousands of Jews fled into the swamps or forests and joined the partisans, although the partisan movements did not always welcome them. In Lithuania and Belarus, an area with a heavy concentration of Jews, and also an area which suited partisan operations, Jewish partisan groups saved thousands of Jewish civilians from extermination. No such opportunities existed for the Jewish populations of cities such as
"Many people think the Jews went to their deaths like sheep to the slaughter, and that's not true—it's absolutely not true. I worked closely with many Jewish people in the Resistance, and I can tell you, they took much greater risks than I did."
— Pieter Meerburg. The Heart Has Reasons: Holocaust Rescuers and Their Stories of Courage.[176]
For the great majority of Jews resistance could take only the passive forms of delay, evasion, negotiation, bargaining and, where possible, bribery of German officials. The Nazis encouraged this by forcing the Jewish communities to police themselves, through bodies such as the
The historical conditioning of the Jewish communities of Europe to accept persecution and avert disaster through compromise and negotiation was the most important factor in the failure to resist until the very end. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising took place only when the Jewish population had been reduced from 500,000 to 100,000, and it was obvious that no further compromise was possible. Paul Johnson writes: "The Jews had been persecuted for a millennium and a half and had learned from long experience that resistance cost lives rather than saved them. Their history, their theology, their folklore, their social structure, even their vocabulary trained them to negotiate, to pay, to plead, to protest, not to fight."[178]
The Jewish communities were also systematically deceived about German intentions, and were cut off from most sources of news from the outside world. The Germans told the Jews that they were being deported to work camps– euphemistically calling it "resettlement in the East"– and maintained this illusion through elaborate deceptions all the way to the gas chamber doors (which were marked with labels stating that the chambers were for removal of lice) to avoid uprisings. As photographs testify, Jews disembarked at the railway stations at Auschwitz and other extermination camps carrying sacks and suitcases, clearly having no idea of the fate that awaited them. Rumours of the reality of the extermination camps filtered back only slowly to the ghettos, and were usually not believed, just as they were not believed when couriers such as Jan Karski, the Polish resistance fighter, conveyed them to the western Allies.[179]
Climax
This section needs additional citations for verification. (June 2011) |
Heydrich was assassinated in
Despite the high productivity of the war industries based in the Jewish ghettos in the General Government, during 1943 they were liquidated, and their populations shipped to the camps for extermination. The largest of these operations, the deportation of 100,000 people from the Warsaw Ghetto in early 1943, provoked the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which was suppressed with great brutality. Approximately 42,000 Jews were shot during the Operation Harvest Festival on November 3–4, 1943.[181] At the same time, rail shipments arrived regularly from western and southern Europe. Few Jews were shipped from the occupied Soviet territories to the camps: the killing of Jews in this zone was left in the hands of the SS, aided by locally recruited auxiliaries. In any case, by the end of 1943 the Germans had been driven from most Soviet territory.
Shipments of Jews to the camps had priority on the German railways, and continued even in the face of the increasingly dire military situation after the Battle of Stalingrad at the end of 1942 and the escalating Allied air attacks on German industry and transport. Army leaders and economic managers complained at this diversion of resources and at the killing of irreplaceable skilled Jewish workers. By 1944, moreover, it was evident to most Germans not blinded by Nazi fanaticism that Germany was losing the war. Many senior officials began to fear the retribution that might await Germany and them personally for the crimes being committed in their name. But the power of Himmler and the SS within the German Reich was too great to resist, and Himmler could always evoke Hitler's authority for his demands.
In October 1943, Himmler gave a speech to senior Nazi Party officials gathered in Posen (now Poznań in western Poland). Here he came closer than ever before to stating explicitly that he was intent on exterminating the Jews of Europe:
I may here in this closest of circles allude to a question which you, my party comrades, have all taken for granted, but which has become for me the most difficult question of my life, the Jewish question ... I ask of you that what I say in this circle you really only hear and never speak of ... We come to the question: how is it with the women and children? I have resolved even here on a completely clear solution. I do not consider myself justified in eradicating the men—so to speak killing them or ordering them to be killed—and allowing the avengers in the shape of the children to grow up ... The difficult decision had to be taken, to cause this people to disappear from the earth.
The audience for this speech included Admiral Karl Dönitz and Armaments Minister Albert Speer, both of whom successfully claimed at the Nuremberg trials that they had had no knowledge of the Final Solution. The text of this speech was not known at the time of their trials.
The scale of extermination slackened somewhat at the beginning of 1944 once the ghettos in occupied Poland were emptied, but on March 19, 1944, Hitler ordered the
Hungary did nothing in the matter of the Jewish problem, and was not prepared to settle accounts with the large Jewish population in Hungary.[182]
More than half of them were shipped to Auschwitz in the course of the year. The commandant, Rudolf Höß, said at his trial that he killed 400,000 Hungarian Jews in three months.
"Blood for Goods"
The operation to kill Hungarian Jews met strong opposition within the Nazi hierarchy, and there were some suggestions that Hitler should offer the Allies a deal where they would be spared in exchange for a favorable peace settlement. There were unofficial negotiations in
Escapes, publication of existence (April–June 1944)
Escapes from the camps were few, but not unknown. The few Auschwitz escapes that succeeded were made possible by the Polish underground inside the camp and local people outside.[184] In 1940, the Auschwitz commandant reported that "the local population is fanatically Polish and ... prepared to take any action against the hated SS camp personnel. Every prisoner who managed to escape can count on help the moment he reaches the wall of a first Polish farmstead."[185]
In February 1942, an escaped inmate from the
By at least October 9, 1942, British radio had broadcast news of gassing of Jews to The Netherlands.[190] In December 1942, the western Allies released the Joint Declaration by Members of the United Nations, that described how "Hitler's oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe" was being carried out and which declared that they "condemn in the strongest possible terms this bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination."[191][192]
In 1942,
In July 1943, Karski again personally reported to Roosevelt about the situation in Poland. During their meeting Roosevelt suddenly interrupted his report and asked about the condition of horses in occupied Poland.
News about gassing Jews was also published in illegal newspapers of the Dutch resistance, like in the issue of Het Parool of September 27, 1943. However, the news was so unbelievable that many assumed it was merely war propaganda. The publications were halted because they were counter-productive for the Dutch resistance. Nevertheless, many Jews were warned that they would be murdered, but as escape was impossible for most of them, they preferred to believe that the warnings were false.[198][199]
In September 1940, Captain
Before Pilecki escaped from Auschwitz the most spectacular escape took place on June 20, 1942, when Ukrainian
Two other Auschwitz inmates, Arnost Rosin and Czesław Mordowicz escaped on May 27, 1944, arriving in Slovakia on June 6, the day of the
The BBC and The New York Times published material from the Vrba-Wetzler report on June 15[205] June 20, July 3[206] and July 6[207] 1944. The subsequent pressure from world leaders persuaded Miklós Horthy to bring the mass deportations of Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz to a halt on July 9, saving up to 200,000 Jews from the extermination camps.[204]
On November 14, 2001, in the 150th anniversary issue, The New York Times ran an article by former editor
Death marches (1944–1945)
By mid 1944, the Final Solution had largely run its course. Those Jewish communities within easy reach of the Nazi regime had been largely exterminated, in proportions ranging from about 25 percent in France to more than 90 percent in Poland. In May, Himmler claimed in a speech that "The Jewish question in Germany and the occupied countries has been solved."[211] During 1944, in any case, the task became steadily more difficult. German armies were evicted from the Soviet Union, the Balkans and Italy, and German allies were either defeated or were switching sides to the Allies. In June, the western Allies landed in France. Allied air attacks and the operations of partisans made rail transport increasingly difficult, and the objections of the military to the diversion of rail transport for carrying Jews to Poland more urgent and harder to ignore.
At this time, as the Soviet armed forces approached, the camps in eastern Poland were closed down, any surviving inmates being shipped west to camps closer to Germany, first to Auschwitz and later to
Despite the desperate military situation, great efforts were made to conceal evidence of what had happened in the camps. The gas chambers were dismantled, the crematoria dynamited, mass graves dug up and the corpses cremated, and Polish farmers were induced to plant crops on the sites to give the impression that they had never existed. Local commanders continued to kill Jews, and to shuttle them from camp to camp by forced "death marches" until the last weeks of the war.[213]
Already sick after months or years of violence and starvation, prisoners were forced to march for tens of miles in the snow to train stations; then transported for days at a time without food or shelter in freight trains with open carriages; and forced to march again at the other end to the new camp. Those who lagged behind or fell were shot. Around 250,000 Jews died during these marches.[214]
The largest and best-known of the death marches took place in January 1945, when the Soviet army advanced on Poland. Nine days before the Soviets arrived at Auschwitz, the SS marched 60,000 prisoners out of the camp toward Wodzislaw, 56 km (35 mi) away, where they were put on freight trains to other camps. Around 15,000 died on the way. Elie Wiesel and his father, Shlomo, were among the marchers:
An icy wind blew in violent gusts. But we marched without faltering.
Pitch darkness. Every now and then, an explosion in the night. They had orders to fire on any who could not keep up. Their fingers on the triggers, they did not deprive themselves of this pleasure. If one of us had stopped for a second, a sharp shot finished off another filthy son of a bitch.
Near me, men were collapsing in the dirty snow. Shots.[215]
Liberation
The first major camp,
In most of the camps discovered by the Soviets, almost all the prisoners had already been removed, leaving only a few thousand alive—7,000 inmates were found in Auschwitz, including 180 children who had been experimented on by doctors.[219] Some 60,000 prisoners were discovered at Bergen-Belsen by the British 11th Armoured Division,[220] 13,000 corpses lay unburied, and another 10,000 died from typhus or malnutrition over the following weeks.[221] The British forced the remaining SS guards to gather up the corpses and place them in mass graves.[222]
The BBC's Richard Dimbleby described the scenes that greeted him and the British Army at Belsen:[223]
Here over an acre of ground lay dead and dying people. You could not see which was which ... The living lay with their heads against the corpses and around them moved the awful, ghostly procession of emaciated, aimless people, with nothing to do and with no hope of life, unable to move out of your way, unable to look at the terrible sights around them ... Babies had been born here, tiny wizened things that could not live ... A mother, driven mad, screamed at a British sentry to give her milk for her child, and thrust the tiny mite into his arms ... He opened the bundle and found the baby had been dead for days. This day at Belsen was the most horrible of my life.
Victims and death toll
Victims | Killed | Source |
---|---|---|
Jews | 5.9 million | [225] |
Soviet POWs | 2–3 million | [226] |
Ethnic Poles | 1.8–2 million | [227][228] |
Romani | 220,000–1,500,000 | [229][230] |
Disabled | 200,000–250,000 | [231] |
Freemasons | 80,000 | [232] |
Slovenes | 20,000–25,000 | [233] |
Homosexuals | 5,000–15,000 | [234] |
Jehovah's Witnesses |
2,500–5,000 | [235] |
The number of victims depends on which definition of "the Holocaust" is used. Donald Niewyk and Francis Nicosia write in The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust that the term is commonly defined[8] as the mass murder, and attempt to wipe out, European Jewry, which would bring the total number of victims to just under six million—around 78 percent of the 7.3 million Jews in occupied Europe at the time.[236]
Broader definitions include approximately 2 to 3 million Soviet POWs, 2 million ethnic Poles, up to 1,500,000 Romani, 200,000 handicapped, political and religious dissenters, 15,000 homosexuals and 5,000 Jehovah's Witnesses, bringing the death toll to around 11 million. The broadest definition would include 6 million Soviet civilians, raising the death toll to 17 million.
Jewish
Since 1945, the most commonly cited figure for the total number of Jews killed has been six million. The Yad Vashem Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, writes that there is no precise figure for the number of Jews killed. The figure most commonly used is the six million attributed to Adolf Eichmann, a senior SS official.[238] Early calculations range from 5.1 million from Raul Hilberg, to 5.95 million from Jacob Leschinsky. Yisrael Gutman and Robert Rozett in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust estimate 5.59–5.86 million.[239] A study led by Wolfgang Benz of the Technical University of Berlin suggests 5.29–6.2 million.[240][241] Yad Vashem writes that the main sources for these statistics are comparisons of prewar and postwar censuses and population estimates, and Nazi documentation on deportations and murders.[240] Its Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names currently holds close to 3 million names of Holocaust victims, all accessible online. Yad Vashem continues its project of collecting names of Jewish victims from historical documents and individual memories.[242]
Hilberg's estimate of 5.1 million, in the third edition of The Destruction of the European Jews, includes over 800,000 who died from "ghettoization and general privation"; 1,400,000 killed in open-air shootings; and up to 2,900,000 who perished in camps. Hilberg estimates the death toll of Jews in Poland as up to 3,000,000.[243] Hilberg's numbers are generally considered to be a conservative estimate, as they typically include only those deaths for which records are available, avoiding statistical adjustment.[244]
British historian Martin Gilbert arrived at a "minimum estimate" of over 5.75 million Jewish victims.[245] Lucy S. Dawidowicz used pre-war census figures to estimate that 5.934 million Jews died (see table below).[246]
There were about 8 to 10 million Jews in the territories controlled directly or indirectly by the Nazis (the uncertainty arises from the lack of knowledge about how many Jews there were in the Soviet Union). The six million killed in the Holocaust thus represent 60 to 75 percent of these Jews. Of Poland's 3.3 million Jews, over 90 percent were killed. The same proportion were killed in
Year | Jews killed[248] |
---|---|
1933–1940 | under 100,000 |
1941 | 1,100,000 |
1942 | 2,700,000 |
1943 | 500,000 |
1944 | 600,000 |
1945 | 100,000 |
Extermination Camp | Estimate of number killed |
---|---|
Auschwitz-Birkenau | 1 million;[137] |
Treblinka
|
870,000;[152] |
Belzec | 600,000;[140] |
Majdanek
|
79,000 – 235,000;[146][249] |
Chełmno | 320,000;[142] |
Sobibor | 250,000.[150] |
This gives a total of over 3.8 million; of these, 80–90% were estimated to be Jews. These seven camps thus accounted for half the total number of Jews killed in the entire Nazi Holocaust. Virtually the entire Jewish population of Poland died in these camps.[225]
In addition to those who died in the above extermination camps, at least half a million Jews died in other camps, including the major concentration camps in Germany. These were not extermination camps, but had large numbers of Jewish prisoners at various times, particularly in the last year of the war as the Nazis withdrew from Poland. About a million people died in these camps, and although the proportion of Jews is not known with certainty, it was estimated to be at least 50 percent.[citation needed] Another 800,000 to one million Jews were killed by the Einsatzgruppen in the occupied Soviet territories (an approximate figure, since the Einsatzgruppen killings were frequently undocumented).[250] Many more died through execution or of disease and malnutrition in the ghettos of Poland before they could be deported.
By country
Country | Estimated Pre-War Jewish population |
Estimated killed | Percent killed |
---|---|---|---|
Poland | 3,300,000 | 3,000,000 | 90 |
Baltic countries
|
253,000 | 228,000 | 90 |
Germany & Austria | 240,000 | 210,000 | 90 |
Bohemia & Moravia | 90,000 | 80,000 | 89 |
Slovakia | 90,000 | 75,000 | 83 |
Greece | 70,000 | 54,000 | 77 |
Netherlands | 140,000 | 105,000 | 75 |
Hungary | 650,000 | 450,000 | 70 |
Byelorussian SSR
|
375,000 | 245,000 | 65 |
Ukrainian SSR
|
1,500,000 | 900,000 | 60 |
Belgium | 65,000 | 40,000 | 60 |
Yugoslavia | 43,000 | 26,000 | 60 |
Romania | 600,000 | 300,000 | 50 |
Norway | 2,173 | 890 | 41 |
France | 350,000 | 90,000 | 26 |
Bulgaria | 64,000 | 14,000 | 22 |
Italy | 40,000 | 8,000 | 20 |
Luxembourg | 5,000 | 1,000 | 20 |
Russian SFSR
|
975,000 | 107,000 | 11 |
Finland | 2,000 | 22 | 1 |
Denmark | 8,000 | 52 | <1 |
Total | 8,861,800 | 5,933,900 | 67 |
In the 1990s, the opening of government archives in Eastern Europe resulted in the adjustment of the death tolls published in the pioneering work by Hilberg, Dawidowicz and Gilbert, (i.e. compare Gilbert's estimation of 2 million deaths in Auswitz-Burkenau with the updated figure of 1 million in the Extermination Camp data box.) As pointed out above, Wolfgang Benz has been carrying out work on the more recent data. He concluded in 1999:
"The goal of annihilating all of the Jews of Europe, as it was proclaimed at the conference in the villa Am Grossen Wannsee in January 1942, was not reached. Yet the six million murder victims make the holocaust a unique crime in the history of mankind. The number of victims—and with certainty the following represent the minimum number in each case—cannot express that adequately. Numbers are just too abstract. However they must be stated in order to make clear the dimension of the genocide: 165,000 Jews from Germany, 65,000 from Austria, 32,000 from France and Belgium, more than 100,000 from the Netherlands, 60,000 from Greece, the same number from Yugoslavia, more than 140,000 from Czechoslovakia, half a million from Hungary, 2.2 million from the Soviet Union, and 2.7 million from Poland. To these numbers must be added all those killed in the pogroms and massacres in Romania and Transitrien (over 200,000) and the deported and murdered Jews from Albania and Norway, Denmark and Italy, from Luxembourg and Bulgaria."[251]
As most of the victims of the Holocaust were speakers of Yiddish, the Holocaust had a profound and permanent effect on the fate of Yiddish language and culture. On the eve of World War II, there were 11 to 13 million Yiddish speakers in the world.[252] The Holocaust, however, led to a dramatic, sudden decline in the use of Yiddish, as the extensive Jewish communities, both secular and religious, that used Yiddish in their day-to-day life were largely destroyed. Around 5 million, or 85%, of the victims of the Holocaust, were speakers of Yiddish.[253]
Non Jewish
Slavs
One of Hitler's ambitions at the start of the war was to exterminate, expel, or enslave most or all
It is a question of existence, thus it will be a racial struggle of pitiless severity, in the course of which 20 to 30 million Slavs and Jews will perish through military actions and crises of food supply.
— Heinrich Himmler, June 1941[256]
Ethnic Poles
German Nazi planners had in November 1939 called for "the complete destruction" of all Poles.[257] "All Poles", Heinrich Himmler swore, "will disappear from the world". The Polish state under German occupation was to be cleared of ethnic Poles and settled by German colonists.[258] Of the Poles, by 1952 only about 3–4 million of them were to be left in the former Poland, and only to serve as slaves for German settlers. They were to be forbidden to marry, the existing ban on any medical help to Poles in Germany would be extended, and eventually Poles would cease to exist. On August 22, 1939, about one week before the onset of the war, Hitler had "prepared, for the moment only in the East, my 'Death's Head' formations with orders to kill without pity or mercy all men, women and children of Polish descent or language. Only in this way can we obtain the living space we need."[259] Nazi planners decided against a genocide of ethnic Poles on the same scale as against ethnic Jews, it could not proceed in the short run since "such a solution to the Polish question would represent a burden to the German people into the distant future, and everywhere rob us of all understanding, not least in that neighbouring peoples would have to reckon at some appropriate time, with a similar fate".[257]
The actions taken against ethnic Poles were not on the scale of the genocide of the Jews. Most Polish Jews (perhaps 90% of their antebellum population) perished during the Holocaust, while most Christian Poles survived the brutal German occupation.[260] Between 1.8 and 2.1 million non-Jewish Polish citizens perished in German hands during the course of the war, about four-fifths of whom were ethnic Poles with the remaining fifth being ethnic minorities of Ukrainians and Belarusians, the vast majority of them civilians.[227][228] At least 200,000 of these victims died in concentration camps with about 146,000 being killed in Auschwitz. Many others died as a result of general massacres such as in the Warsaw Uprising where between 120,000 and 200,000 civilians were killed.[261] The policy of the Germans in Poland included diminishing food rations, conscious lowering of the state of hygiene and depriving the population of medical services. The general mortality rate rose from 13 to 18 per thousand.[262] Overall, about 5.6 million of the victims World War II were Polish citizens,[228] both Jewish and non-Jewish, and over the course of the war Poland lost 16 percent of its pre-war population; approximately 3.1 million of the 3.3 million Polish Jews and approximately 2 million of the 31.7 million non-Jewish Polish citizens died at German hands during the war.[263] According to recent (2009) estimates by IPN, over 2.5 million non-Jewish Polish citizens died as a result of the German occupation.[264] Over 90 percent of the death toll came through non-military losses, as most of the civilians were targeted by various deliberate actions by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.[261]
Ethnic Serbs and other South Slavs
In the Balkans, up to 581,000 Yugoslavs were killed by the Nazis and their Ustaše fascist allies in Yugoslavia.[265][266] German forces, under express orders from Hitler, fought with a special vengeance against the Serbs, who were considered Untermensch.[267] The Ustaše collaborators conducted a systematic extermination of large numbers of people for political, religious or racial reasons. The most numerous victims were Serbs.
As a direct consequence of Nazi rule, between 20,000 and 25,000 thousand
Bosniaks and Croats were also victims of the Jasenovac concentration camp. According to the U.S. Holocaust Museum:
"The Ustaša authorities established numerous concentration camps in Croatia between 1941 and 1945. These camps were used to isolate and murder Serbs, Jews, Roma, Muslims [Bosniaks], and other non-Catholic minorities, as well as Croatian political and religious opponents of the regime."
The
As per the most recent study, Bosnjaci u Jasenovackom logoru ("Bosniaks in Jasenovac concentration camp") by the author Nihad Halilbegovic, at least 103,000 Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslim Slavs) perished during Holocaust at the hands of the Nazi regime and Croatian Ustaše. According to the study "unknown is the full number of Bosniaks who were murdered under Serb or Croat alias or national name" and "large numbers of Bosniaks were killed and listed under Roma populations", therefore in advance sentenced to death and extermination.[273][274]
East Slavs
Soviet civilian populations in the occupied areas were also heavily persecuted (in addition to the barbarity of the
In
The German racists assigned the Slavs to the lowest rank of human life, from which the Jews were altogether excluded. The Germans thus looked upon Slavs as people not fit to be educated, not able to govern themselves, worthy only as slaves whose existence would be justified because they served their German masters. Hitler's racial policy with regard to the Slavs, to the extent that it was formulated, was "depopulation." The Slavs were to be prevented from procreating, except to provide the necessary continuing supply of slave laborers.
— Lucy Dawidowicz, The Holocaust and the historians[278]
Soviet POWs
According to
Romani people
... they wish to toss into the Ghetto everything that is characteristically dirty, shabby, bizarre, of which one ought to be frightened and which anyway had to be destroyed.
—Emmanuel Ringelblum on the Roma.[281]
Because the Roma and Sinti are traditionally a secretive people with a culture based on oral history, less is known about their experience of the genocide than about that of any other group.[282][283] Yehuda Bauer writes that the lack of information can be attributed to the Roma's distrust and suspicion, and to their humiliation, because some of the basic taboos of Romani culture regarding hygiene and sexual contact were violated at Auschwitz. Bauer writes that "most [Roma] could not relate their stories involving these tortures; as a result, most kept silent and thus increased the effects of the massive trauma they had undergone."[284]
The treatment of Romanis was not consistent in the different areas that Nazi Germany conquered. In some areas (e.g. Luxembourg and the Baltic countries), the Nazis killed virtually the entire Romani population. In other areas (e.g. Denmark, Greece), there is no record of Romanis being subjected to mass killings.[285]
Donald Niewyk and Frances Nicosia write that the death toll was at least 130,000 of the nearly one million Roma and Sinti in Nazi-controlled Europe.[282] Michael Berenbaum writes that serious scholarly estimates lie between 90,000 and 220,000.[286] A study by Sybil Milton, senior historian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, calculated a death toll of at least 220,000 and possibly closer to 500,000, but this study explicitly excluded the Independent State of Croatia where the genocide of Romanies was intense.[287][288] Martin Gilbert estimates a total of more than 220,000 of the 700,000 Romani in Europe.[289] Ian Hancock, Director of the Program of Romani Studies and the Romani Archives and Documentation Center at the University of Texas at Austin, has argued in favour of a higher figure of between 500,000 and 1,500,000.[290] Hancock writes that, proportionately, the death toll equaled "and almost certainly exceed[ed], that of Jewish victims."[291]
Before being sent to the camps, the victims were herded into ghettos, including several hundred into the Warsaw Ghetto.[93] Further east, teams of Einsatzgruppen tracked down Romani encampments and murdered the inhabitants on the spot, leaving no records of the victims. They were also targeted by the puppet regimes that cooperated with the Nazis, e.g. the Ustaše regime in Croatia, where a large number of Romani were killed in the Jasenovac concentration camp. The genocide analyst Helen Fein has stated that the Ustashe killed virtually every Romani in Croatia.[292]
In May 1942, the Romani were placed under the same labor and social laws as the Jews. On December 16, 1942,
This was adjusted on November 15, 1943, when Himmler ordered that, in the occupied Soviet areas, "sedentary Gypsies and part-Gypsies (Mischlinge) are to be treated as citizens of the country. Nomadic Gypsies and part-Gypsies are to be placed on the same level as Jews and placed in concentration camps."[295] Bauer argues that this adjustment reflected Nazi ideology that the Roma, originally an Aryan population, had been "spoiled" by non-Romani blood.[296]
Persons of color
The number of black people in Germany when the Nazis came to power is variously estimated at 5,000–25,000.
Disabled and mentally ill
Our starting point is not the individual: We do not subscribe to the view that one should feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, or clothe the naked ... Our objectives are different: We must have a healthy people in order to prevail in the world.
— Joseph Goebbels, 1938.[301]
Action T4 was a program established in 1939 to maintain the
Between 1939 and 1941, 80,000 to 100,000 mentally ill adults in institutions were killed; 5,000 children in institutions; and 1,000 Jews in institutions.[303] Outside the mental health institutions, the figures are estimated as 20,000 (according to Dr. Georg Renno, the deputy director of Schloss Hartheim, one of the euthanasia centers) or 400,000 (according to Frank Zeireis, the commandant of Mauthausen concentration camp).[303] Another 300,000 were forcibly sterilized.[304] Overall it has been estimated that over 200,000 individuals with mental disorders of all kinds were put to death, although their mass murder has received relatively little historical attention. Despite not being formally ordered to take part, psychiatrists and psychiatric institutions were at the center of justifying, planning and carrying out the atrocities at every stage, and "constituted the connection" to the later annihilation of Jews and other "undesirables" in the Holocaust.[305] After strong protests by the German Catholic and Protestant churches on August 24, 1941 Hitler ordered the cancellation of the T4 program.[306]
The program was named after Tiergartenstraße 4, the address of a villa in the Berlin borough of Tiergarten, the headquarters of the Gemeinnützige Stiftung für Heil und Anstaltspflege (General Foundation for Welfare and Institutional Care),[307] led by Philipp Bouhler, head of Hitler's private chancellery (Kanzlei des Führer der NSDAP) and Karl Brandt, Hitler's personal physician.
Brandt was tried in December 1946 at
Homosexuals
Between 5,000 and 15,000 homosexuals of German nationality are estimated to have been sent to concentration camps.[234] James D. Steakley writes that what mattered in Germany was criminal intent or character, rather than criminal acts, and the "gesundes Volksempfinden" ("healthy sensibility of the people") became the leading normative legal principle.[308] In 1936, Himmler created the "Reichszentrale zur Bekämpfung der Homosexualität und Abtreibung" ("Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion").[309] Homosexuality was declared contrary to "wholesome popular sentiment,"[234] and homosexuals were consequently regarded as "defilers of German blood." The Gestapo raided gay bars, tracked individuals using the address books of those they arrested, used the subscription lists of gay magazines to find others, and encouraged people to report suspected homosexual behavior and to scrutinize the behavior of their neighbours.[234][308]
Tens of thousands were convicted between 1933 and 1944 and sent to camps for "rehabilitation", where they were identified by yellow armbands[310] and later pink triangles worn on the left side of the jacket and the right trouser leg, which singled them out for sexual abuse.[308] Hundreds were castrated by court order.[311] They were humiliated, tortured, used in hormone experiments conducted by SS doctors, and killed.[234] Steakley writes that the full extent of gay suffering was slow to emerge after the war. Many victims kept their stories to themselves because homosexuality remained criminalized in postwar Germany. Around two percent of German homosexuals were persecuted by Nazis.[308]
The political left
German
Hitler and the Nazis also hated German
Whenever the Nazis occupied a new territory, members of communist, socialist, or anarchist groups were normally to be the first persons detained or executed. Evidence of this is found in Hitler's infamous Commissar Order, in which he ordered the summary execution of all political commissars captured among Soviet soldiers, as well as the execution of all Communist Party members in German held territory.[315][316] Einsatzgruppen carried out these executions in the east.[317]
Freemasons
In
Jehovah's Witnesses
Refusing to pledge allegiance to the Nazi party or to serve in the military, roughly 12,000 Jehovah's Witnesses were forced to wear a purple triangle and were placed in camps where they were given the option of renouncing their faith and submitting to the state's authority. Between 2,500 and 5,000 were killed.[235] Historian Detlef Garbe, director at the Neuengamme (Hamburg) Memorial, writes that "no other religious movement resisted the pressure to conform to National Socialism with comparable unanimity and steadfastness."[321]
Uniqueness
Dr. Shimon Samuels, director for International Liaison of the
See also
Related articles
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Major perpetrators
Involvement of other countries and nationals
- General
- Évian Conference
- Bermuda Conference
- International response to the Holocaust
- Struma
- Voyage of the Damned
- Collaborators
- The response of individual states.
- Rescuers
- List of people who assisted Jews during the Holocaust
- List of Righteous Among the Nations by country
- Rescue of the Danish Jews
- Rescue of Jews by Poles during the Holocaust
- Righteous Among the Nations
- Związek Organizacji Wojskowej
- Żegota
- Arab rescue efforts during the Holocaust
|
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Aftermath and historiography
|
|
Miscellaneous
- Animal rights and the Holocaust
- Anti-Semitism
- Antiziganism
- Aryanization
- Bereavement in Judaism
- Holocaust trivialization debate
- Jews outside Europe under Nazi occupation
Related links
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References
- ^ "The Auschwitz Album", Yad Vashem.
- ^ The word is only marginally found in Greek [Classical] literature referring in general to an offering. The adjective ὁλόκαυστος "holókaustos], "wholly burned", more common in the parallel form ὁλόκαυτος [holókautos], is in the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible used in Leviticus 6,21–22 in the following context: "[...] the baked pieces of the grain offering you shall offer for a sweet aroma to the Lord. / The priest [...] shall offer it. It is a statute for ever to the Lord. It shall be wholly burned)."
- ^ a b "Holocaust," Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2009: "the systematic state-sponsored killing of six million Jewish men, women and children, and millions of others by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II. The Nazis called this "the final solution to the Jewish question ..."
- ^ a b Niewyk, Donald L. The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust, Columbia University Press, 2000, p.45: "The Holocaust is commonly defined as the murder of more than 5,000,000 Jews by the Germans in World War II." Also see "The Holocaust", Encyclopædia Britannica, 2007: "the systematic state-sponsored killing of six million Jewish men, women and children, and millions of others, by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II. The Germans called this "the final solution to the Jewish question". Cite error: The named reference "Niewyk1" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
- ^ "Brian Levin, Director, Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, California State University:". Huffingtonpost.com. Retrieved July 31, 2010.
- ^ "Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women ... - Google Books". Books.google.com. December 14, 2010. Retrieved October 30, 2011.
- ^ "Children of the Holocaust - Stephanie Fitzgerald - Google Books". Books.google.com. Retrieved October 30, 2011.
- ^ a b c d Niewyk, Donald L. and Nicosia, Francis R. The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust, Columbia University Press, 2000, pp. 45–52.
- ^ "Timothy SnyderHolocaust: The ignored reality". Eurozine.com. Retrieved October 30, 2011.
- ISBN 0-465-00239-0.pp. x, 384.
- ^ Estimates of the death toll of non-Jewish victims vary by millions, partly because the boundary between death by persecution and death by starvation and other means in a context of total war is unclear. Overall, about 5.7 million (78 percent) of the 7.3 million Jews in occupied Europe perished (Gilbert, Martin. Atlas of the Holocaust 1988, pp. 242–244). The most up to date estimates of non-Jews murdered by the Nazis has been made by historian Timothy Snyder who using documents which have become available from the former Soviet Union estimates the figures of between 5 and 6 million people.
- ^ a b Alan Steinweis provides a survey of this phenomenon, "The Holocaust and American Culture", published in the journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 2001.
- ^ a b Berenbaum, Michael. "The World Must Know", United States Holocaust Museum, 2006, p. 103.
- ^ John Ezard (February 17, 2001). "Germans knew of Holocaust horror about death camps". The Guardian.
- ^ The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia, vol.4, p.2859
- ^ ""The Holocaust: Definition and Preliminary Discussion", Yad Vashem. Retrieved June 8, 2005.
- ^ For an opposing view on the allegedly offensive nature of the meaning of the word "holocaust", see Petrie, Jon. "The Secular Word 'HOLOCAUST': Scholarly Myths, History, and Twentieth Century Meanings", Journal of Genocide Research Vol. 2, no. 1 (2000): 31–63. (For a web version of this article see [1])
- ^ Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know", United States Holocaust Museum, 2006, p. 104.
- ^ ISBN 0-06-019043-4.
- ISBN 0-300-09300-4.
- ^ Maier, Charles The Unmasterable Past, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988 page 53
- ^ "Holocaust Map of Concentration and Death Camps". History1900s.about.com. June 16, 2010. Retrieved July 31, 2010.
- ISBN 0-19-860446-7.
- ^ Bauer, Yehuda. Rethinking the Holocaust New Haven: Yale UP, 2002, p. 49. For a good summary of this point, see Yehuda Bauer's Address to the Bundestag.
- ISBN 0-300-09300-4.
- ^ ISBN 0-7853-2963-3. Full text
- ISBN 0-87969-531-5.
- ^ ISBN 0-316-09134-0.
- ^ UMN.edu, "Boycotts", Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, University of Minnesota. Retrieved September 6, 2006.
- ^ Yehuda Bauer- A History of the Holocaust, 1982
- ^ Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1961.
- ^ Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, 1975
- ^ Fischer, Conan The Rise of the Nazis, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002 pages 47–49.
- ^ Gramel, Hermann "Modern Anti-Semitism in Germany" pages 33–68 from Antisemitism in the Third Reich, London: Blackwill, 1992 pages 53–54.
- ^ Gramel, Hermann "Modern Anti-Semitism in Germany" pages 33–68 from Antisemitism in the Third Reich, London: Blackwill, 1992 page 61.
- ^ a b c Friedländer, Saul Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939, New York: HarperCollins, 1997 page 76
- ^ Evans, Richard J. In Hitler's Shadow, New York: Pantheon, 1989 page 69.
- ^ Evans, Richard J. In Hitler's Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape the Nazi Past, New York: Pantheon, 1989 page 69.
- ^ Fischer, Conan The Rise of the Nazis, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002 pages 47–51.
- ^ Mommsen, Hans "The New Historical Consciousness" pages 114–124 from Forever In The Shadow of Hitler? edited by Ernst Piper, Humanities Press, Atlantic Highlands, 1993 page 121
- ^ Peukert, Detlev "The Genesis of the 'Final Solution' from the Spirit of Science" pages 274–299 from Nazism and German Society, 1933–1945 edited by David F. Crew, London: Routledge, 1994 pages 280–284
- ^ Peukert, Detlev "The Genesis of the 'Final Solution' from the Spirit of Science" pages 274–299 from Nazism and German Society, 1933–1945 edited by David F. Crew, London: Routledge, 1994 pages 279–280
- ^ Peukert, Detlev "The Genesis of the 'Final Solution' from the Spirit of Science" pages 274–299 from Nazism and German Society, 1933–1945 edited by David F. Crew, London: Routledge, 1994 page 280
- ^ Peukert, Detlev "The Genesis of the 'Final Solution' from the Spirit of Science" pages 274–299 from Nazism and German Society, 1933–1945 edited by David F. Crew, London: Routledge, 1994 page 288
- ^ Burleigh, Michael "Psychiatry, Society and Nazi "Euthanasia" pages 43–62 from The Holocaust: Origins, Implementation, Aftermath edited by Omer Bartov, London: Routledge, 2000, pages 47–48.
- ^ Peukert, Detlev "The Genesis of the 'Final Solution' from the Spirit of Science" pages 274–299 from Nazism and German Society, 1933–1945 edited by David F. Crew, London: Routledge, 1994 page 289
- ^ Hell, Josef. "Aufzeichnung", 1922, ZS 640, p. 5, Institut für Zeitgeschichte, cited in Fleming, Gerald. Hitler and the Final Solution. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1984. p. 17, cited in "Joseph Hell on Adolf Hitler", The Einsatzgruppen.
- ^ Mommsen, Hans (1997). "Interview with Hans Mommsen" (PDF). Yad Vashem. Retrieved February 6, 2010.
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- ^ Peukert, Detlev Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and Racism In Everyday Life, London: Batsford, 1987 page 220.
- ^ Peukert, Detlev Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and Racism In Everyday Life, London: Batsford, 1987 page 221.
- ^ a b "Holocaust Timeline: The Camps". A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust. University of South Florida. Retrieved January 6, 2007.
- ^ a b Peukert, Detlev Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and Racism In Everyday Life, London: Batsford, 1987 page 214.
- ^ a b Friedländer, Saul. Nazi Germany and the Jews Volume 1: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939. HarperPerennial 1998, p. 33.
- ^ Friedländer, Saul. Nazi Germany and the Jews Volume 1: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939. HarperPerennial 1998, p. 29.
- ^ Friedländer, Saul. Nazi Germany and the Jews Volume 1: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939. HarperPerennial 1998, p. 30–31.
- ^ Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988): 108.
- ^ "Extracts From Hitler's Speech in the Reichstag on the Nuremberg Laws, September 1935". Yad Vashem.
- ^ Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know, p. 57.
- ^ "The Eternal Jew. Nazi hate-propaganda film of 1940 that summarized the whole Nazi rationale for the mass murder of the Jews." Robert Michael, Karin Doerr, Nazi-Deutsch/Nazi-German: An English Lexicon of the Language of the Third Reich, Greenwood Press, 2002, p. 154.
- ^ Friedländer, Saul. Nazi Germany and the Jews Volume 1: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939. HarperPerennial 1998, p. 1.
- ^ a b Friedländer, Saul. Nazi Germany and the Jews Volume 1: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939. HarperPerennial 1998, p. 12.
- ^ a b c d e Wolfgang Benz, Die 101 wichtigsten Fragen- das dritte Reich, 2nd edition, C.H. Beck, 2007, p.97, ISBN 3406568491
- ^ Benz 2007:97 says 26,000 to Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen; Buchholz 1999:510 says Pomeranian Jews to Oranienburg
- ^ Werner Buchholz, Pommern, Siedler, 1999, p.510, ISBN 3886802728
- ^ Halbrook, Stephen P. (2000) "Nazi Firearms Law and the Disarming of the German Jews." Arizona Journal of International and Comparative Law, Vol 17. No. 3. p.528.
- ^ Magnus Brechtken, Madagaskar für die Juden: antisemitische Idee und politische Praxis 1885–1945, 2nd edition, Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 1998, pp.200–201, ISBN 348656384X
- ^ Magnus Brechtken, Madagaskar für die Juden: antisemitische Idee und politische Praxis 1885–1945, 2nd edition, Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 1998, pp.196ff, ISBN 348656384X
- ^ a b c Magnus Brechtken, Madagaskar für die Juden: antisemitische Idee und politische Praxis 1885–1945, 2nd edition, Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 1998, p.207, ISBN 348656384X
- ^ Joseph Poprzeczny, Odilo Globocnik, Hitler's man in the East, McFarland, 2004, p.150, ISBN 0786416254
- ^ Magnus Brechtken, Madagaskar für die Juden: antisemitische Idee und politische Praxis 1885–1945, 2nd edition, Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 1998, p.197, ISBN 348656384X
- ISBN 9780674009943. Retrieved April 20, 2009.)
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suggested) (help - ^ Nicosia, Francis R. The third Reich & the Palestine question, Transaction Publishers, 2000; Black, Edwin, The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Pact Between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine, 2001.
- ^ a b Padfield, Peter. Himmler: Reichsfuhrer SS. Macmillian 1990, p. 270. Padfield gives as his source for both the Heydrich quote and Eichmann's comment on it J von Lang and C Sybill (eds) Eichmann Interrogated. Bodley Head, London 1982, pp. 92–93.
- ^ "The Warsaw Ghetto". Retrieved May 5, 2007.
- ^ Nicosia and Niewyk, The Columbian Guide to the Holocaust, 232.
- ^ Dwork, Debórah, Jan van Pelt, Robert, Holocaust: A History, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2003, p. 206.
- ^ Nicosia and Niewyk, The Columbian Guide to the Holocaust, 153.
- ^ Kats, Alfred, Poland's Ghettos at War, New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1970, 35.
- ^ Yad ṿa-shem, rashut ha-zikaron la-Shoʾah ṿela-gevurah, Yad Vashem studies XXXI, Yad Vashem Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, 2003, p.322
- ^ Nicosia and Niewyk, The Columbian Guide to the Holocaust, 154.
- ^ Dwork and Jan van Pelt, Holocaust: A History, 208.
- ISBN 9780664223533. Retrieved April 20, 2009.)
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suggested) (help - ^ a b c d e f Krausnick, Helmut "The Persecution of the Jews" pages 1–125 from The Anatomy of the SS State, New York: Walker and Company, 1968 page 57.
- ^ "Concentration Camp Listing", Jewish Virtual Library.
- ^ "The Forgotten Camps".
- ^ ""Just a Normal Day in the Camps", JewishGen, January 6, 2007". Jewishgen.org. March 30, 1999. Retrieved July 31, 2010.
- ^ a b Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2006, p. 114.
- ^ a b c "Deportations to and from the Warsaw Ghetto", United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
- ^ Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2006, p. 115–116.
- ^ Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, this edition 2006, pp. 81–83.
- ^ Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, this edition 2006, p 116.
- ^ The inscription on the memorial stone raised in the place of the barn at Jedwabne read: "Place of torture and execution of the Jewish population. The Gestapo and Nazi gendarmerie burned 1600 people alive on July 10, 1941." (Polish: Miejsce kaźni ludności żydowskiej. Gestapo i żandarmeria hitlerowska spaliła żywcem 1600 osób 10.VII.1941.). In 2001 the stone was removed and deposited in the Polish Army Museum in Białystok.
- ^ Dina Porat, "The Holocaust in Lithuania: Some Unique Aspects", in David Cesarani, The Final Solution: Origins and Implementation, Routledge, 2002, ISBN 0415152321, Google Print, p. 159
- ^ Konrad Kwiet, Rehearsing for Murder: The Beginning of the Final Solution in Lithuania in June 1941, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Volume 12, Number 1, pp. 3–26, 1998, Oxfordjournals.org
- ^ a b c d e f g h Browning, Christopher, and Matthäus, Jürgen, Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy September 1939 -March 1942, Yad Vashem / University of Nebraska Press 2004 ISBN 0-8032-1327-1, at pages 268–277.
- ^ Hillgruber, Andreas "War in the East and the Extermination of the Jews" pages 85–114 from The Nazi Holocaust Part 3, The "Final Solution": The Implementation of Mass Murder Volume 1 edited by Michael Marrus, Mecler: Westpoint, CT 1989 pages 102–103.
- ^ Hillgruber, Andreas "War in the East and the Extermination of the Jews" pages 85–114 from The Nazi Holocaust Part 3, The "Final Solution": The Implementation of Mass Murder Volume 1 edited by Michael Marrus, Mecler: Westpoint, CT 1989 page 103.
- ^ Förster, Jürgen "Complicity or Entanglement?" pages 266–293 from The Holocaust and History edited by Michael Berenbaum and Abraham Peck, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1998, page 276.
- ^ a b Förster, Jürgen "Complicity or Entanglement?" pages 266–293 from The Holocaust and History edited by Michael Berenbaum and Abraham Peck, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, page 276.
- ^ a b Förster, Jürgen "Complicity or Entanglement?" pages 266–293 from The Holocaust and History edited by Michael Berenbaum and Abraham Peck, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1998, page 277.
- ^ Förster, Jürgen "Complicity or Entanglement?" pages 266–293 from The Holocaust and History edited by Michael Berenbaum and Abraham Peck, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1998 page 277.
- ^ Förster, Jürgen "Complicity or Entanglement?" pages 266–293 from The Holocaust and History edited by Michael Berenbaum and Abraham Peck, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1998 page 278.
- ^ Förster, Jürgen "Complicity or Entanglement?" pages 266–293 from The Holocaust and History edited by Michael Berenbaum and Abraham Peck, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1998 page 280.
- ^ Hilberg, Raul cited in Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2nd edition, 2006, p. 93.
- ^ a b Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2nd edition, 2006, p. 93.
- ISBN 978-0803213272.
- ^ Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, this edition 2006, pp. 97–98.
- ^ Isaacs, Jeremy."Susan McConachy', The Guardian, November 23, 2006.
- ^ a b c d e Wolfgang Benz, Die 101 wichtigsten Fragen- das dritte Reich, 2nd edition, C.H. Beck, 2007, p.98, ISBN 3406568491
- ^ Quoted in Kogon, E., H. Langbein, and A. Rueckerl (Eds.) 1993. Nazi Mass Murder: A Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas. New Haven: Yale University Press.
- ^ Letter from Reinhard Heydrich to Martin Luther, Foreign Office, February 26, 1942, regarding the minutes of the Wannsee Conference.
- ^ a b Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, this edition 2006, p. 101–102.
- ^ Morris, Errol. "Mr. Death: Transcript". Retrieved May 15, 2008.
- ^ a b c Protocol of the Wannsee Conference, Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz.
- ^ Marrus, Michael The Holocaust in History, Toronto: KeyPorter, 2000 page 89.
- ^ a b Marrus, Michael The Holocaust in History, Toronto: KeyPorter, 2000 pages 89–90.
- ^ Evans, Richard In Hitler's Shadow, New York, NY: Pantheon, 1989 page 71
- ^ Marrus, Michael The Holocaust in History, Toronto: KeyPorter, 2000 page 91.
- ^ Marrus, Michael The Holocaust in History, Toronto: KeyPorter, 2000 page 92.
- ^ Marrus, Michael The Holocaust in History, Toronto: KeyPorter, 2000 page 93.
- ^ a b c d Marrus, Michael The Holocaust In History, Toronto: Key Porter 2000 page 92.
- ^ a b c Buchheim, Hans "Command and Compliance" pp 303–396 from The Anatomy of the SS State, Walker and Company: New York, 1968 pp 372–373.
- ^ Buchheim, Hans "Command and Compliance" pp 303–396 from The Anatomy of the SS State, Walker and Company: New York, 1968 p 381.
- ^ Buchheim, Hans "Command and Compliance" pp 303–396 from The Anatomy of the SS State, Walker and Company: New York, 1968 pp 386–387.
- ^ Browning, Christopher Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, New York: HarperCollins, 1992 p 57
- ^ Kudryashov, Sergei "Ordinary Collaborators: The Case of the Travniki Guards" pp 226–239 from Russia War, Peace and Diplomacy Essays in Honour of John Erickson edited by Mark and Ljubica Erickson, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004 pp 232–233.
- ^ Kudryashov, Sergei "Ordinary Collaborators: The Case of the Travniki Guards" pp 226–239 from Russia War, Peace and Diplomacy Essays in Honour of John Erickson edited by Mark and Ljubica Erickson, p 232.
- ^ a b Kudryashov, Sergei "Ordinary Collaborators: The Case of the Travniki Guards" pp 226–239 from Russia War, Peace and Diplomacy Essays in Honour of John Erickson edited by Mark and Ljubica Erickson, p 234.
- ^ Kudryashov, Sergei "Ordinary Collaborators: The Case of the Travniki Guards" pp 226–239 from Russia War, Peace and Diplomacy Essays in Honour of John Erickson edited by Mark and Ljubica Erickson, pp 234–235.
- ^ Kudryashov, Sergei "Ordinary Collaborators: The Case of the Travniki Guards" pp 226–239 from Russia War, Peace and Diplomacy Essays in Honour of John Erickson edited by Mark and Ljubica Erickson, pp 226–227 & 234–235.
- ^ Source: Yad Vashem, Accessed May 7, 2007
- ^ a b Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau. Piper, Franciszek. "Gas chambers and Crematoria", in Berenbaum, Michael & Gutman, Yisrael (eds). Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Indiana University Press and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1994, p. 62.
- ^ Per Yadvashem.org[dead link], Auschwitz II total numbers are "between 1.3M–1.5M", so we use the middle value 1.4M as estimate here.
- ^ Coordinates from: Auschwitz concentration camp
- ^ a b Belzec, Yad Vashem.
- ^ Coordinates from: Belzec extermination camp
- ^ a b c Chelmno, Yad Vashem.
- ^ Coordinates from: Chełmno extermination camp
- ^ Jasenovac, Yad Vashem.
- ^ Coordinates from: Jasenovac concentration camp
- ^ a b Majdanek, Yad Vashem.
- Majdanek
- ^ Maly Trostinets, Yad Vashem.
- Maly Trostenets extermination camp
- ^ a b Sobibor, Yad Vashem.
- ^ Coordinates from: Sobibor extermination camp
- ^ a b Treblinka, Yad Vashem.
- ^ Coordinates from: Treblinka extermination camp
- ^ "Aktion Reinhard" (PDF). Yad Vashem.
- ^ Although Chełmno was not technically part of Aktion Reinhard, it began functioning as an extermination camp in December 1941.Yadvashem.org
- ISBN 0-316-09134-0.
- ISBN 0-253-20884-X.)
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link - ^ Piper, Franciszek. "Gas chambers and Crematoria", in Berenbaum, Michael & Gutman, Yisrael (eds). Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Indiana University Press and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1994, p. 162.
- ^ a b Piper, Franciszek. "Gas chambers and Crematoria", in Berenbaum, Michael & Gutman, Yisrael (eds). Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Indiana University Press and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1994, p. 170.
- ^ a b Piper, Franciszek. "Gas chambers and Crematoria", in Berenbaum, Michael & Gutman, Yisrael (eds). Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Indiana University Press and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1994, p. 163.
- ^ Piper, Franciszek. "Gas chambers and Crematoria", in Berenbaum, Michael & Gutman, Yisrael (eds). Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Indiana University Press and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1994, p. 163. Also in Goldensohn, Leon. Nuremberg Interviews, Vintage paperback 2005, p. 298: Goldensohn, an American psychiatrist, interviewed Rudolf Höß at Nuremberg on April 8, 1946. Höß told him: "We cut the hair from women after they had been exterminated in the gas chambers. The hair was then sent to factories, where it was woven into special fittings for gaskets." Höß said that only women's hair was cut and only after they were dead. He said he had first received the order to do this in 1943.
- ^ Piper, Franciszek. "Gas chambers and Crematoria", in Berenbaum, Michael & Gutman, Yisrael (eds). Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Indiana University Press and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1994, p. 172. For the living conditions of the Sonderkommando, Piper quotes survivor testimony from the trial of Adolf Eichmann.
- ^ Piper, Franciszek. "Gas chambers and Crematoria", in Berenbaum, Michael & Gutman, Yisrael (eds). Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Indiana University Press and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1994, p. 171.
- ^ Piper, Franciszek. "Gas chambers and Crematoria", in Berenbaum, Michael & Gutman, Yisrael (eds). Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Indiana University Press and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1994, p. 164.
- ^ Modern History Sourcebook: Rudolf Höß, Commandant of Auschwitz: Testimony at Nuremberg, 1946 Accessed May 6, 2007
- ^
- Bauer, Yehuda. Forms of Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust. In The Nazi Holocaust: Historical Articles on the Destruction of European Jews. Vol. 7: Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust, edited by Michael R. Marrus, 34–48. Westport, Connecticut: Meckler, 1989.
- Bauer, Yehuda, They chose life: Jewish resistance in the Holocaust, New York, The American Jewish Committee, 1973.
- Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust by Israel Gutman. Yad Vashem.
- Resistance During the Holocaust[dead link] U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
- Jewish Resistance. A Working Bibliography. The Miles Lerman Center for the Study of Jewish Resistance. Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
- ^ Gilbert, Martin. The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy. London: St. Edmundsbury Press 1986.
- ^ David M. Kennedy (2007). "The Library of Congress World War II companion". Simon and Schuster. p.780. ISBN 0743252195
- ^ Resistance During the Holocaust[dead link] U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
- ^ a b Lador-Lederer, Joseph. "World War II: Jews as Prisoners of War", Israel Yearbook on Human Rights, vol.10, Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, 1980, pp. 70–89, p. 75, footnote 15. [2]
- ^ Benjamin Pinkus (1990). "The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority". Cambridge University Press. p.261. ISBN 0521389267
- ^ Klempner, Mark. The Heart Has Reasons: Holocaust Rescuers and Their Stories of Courage, The Pilgrim Press, 2006, pp. 145–146.
- ^ Timothy Snyder. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Basic Books, 2010, p.302. ISBN 0465002390
- ^ Schul (1967), pp. 181–3
- ^ Susan Zuccotti, The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews. University of Nebraska Press, 1999, pp. 285. ISBN 0-8032-9914-1
- ^ Klempner, Mark. The Heart Has Reasons: Holocaust Rescuers and Their Stories of Courage. The Pilgrim Press, 2006, pg. 145.
- ^ Kimel, Alexander. "Holocaust Resistance", accessed May 4, 2007.
- ^ Johnson, Paul. A History of the Jews, Harper Perennial, 1988, p. 506.
- ^ Wood, Thomas E. & Jankowski, Stanisław M. Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust, 1994.
- ^ "Killing Centers". USHMM.
- ^ Aktion "Erntefest" (Operation "Harvest Festival"), Holocaust Encyclopedia, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.
- ^ quoted in Richard J. Evans, Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial, (New York: Basic Books), p.92
- ^ a b Conway, John S. "The first report about Auschwitz", Museum of Tolerance, Simon Wiesenthal Center, Annual 1 Chapter 07. Retrieved September 11, 2006.
- ^ Linn, Ruth. Escaping Auschwitz. A culture of forgetting, Cornell University Press, 2004, p. 20.
- ^ Swiebocki, Henryk. "Prisoner Escapes", in Berenbaum, Michael & Gutman, Yisrael (eds). Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Indiana University Press and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1994, p. 505.
- ^ Grojanowski Report
- ^ "Grojanowski Report, Yad Vashem" (PDF). Retrieved July 31, 2010.
- ^ Yad Vashem, "Diaries"
- ^ Memorandum, Arthur Sweetser to Leo Rosten, February 1, 1942, quoted in Eric Hanin, "War on Our Minds: The American Mass Media in World War II" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Rochester, 1976), ch. 4, n.6
- ^ Diary entry on October 9, 1942 by Anne Frank: De Engelse radio spreekt van vergassing, misschien is dat wel de vlugste sterfmethode. [My translation: The English radio speaks of gassing, perhaps that is the quickest way to die]Frank, Anne (2008). Het Acterhuis: Dagboekbrieven 12 juni 1942 – 1 augustus 1944. Bert Bakker, Amsterdam. p. 54.
- ISBN 1-58477-576-9.
- ^ "11 Allies Condemn Nazi War on Jews; United Nations Issue Joint Declaration of Protest on 'Cold-Blooded Extermination'". The New York Times. December 18, 1942.
- ^ Jan Karski (2001). Story of a Secret State. Simon Publications. pp. 391. ISBN 1-931541-39-6
- ^ "FZP.net.pl". FZP.net.pl. Archived from the original on May 6, 2008. Retrieved July 31, 2010.
- ^ "Wspomnienia o Janie Karskim". google.com. Retrieved July 31, 2010.
- ^ "PolishDailyNews.com". PolishDailyNews.com. Retrieved July 31, 2010.
- ^ E. Thomas Wood & Stanisław M. Jankowski (1994). Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust. John Wiley & Sons Inc.. pp. 316. ISBN 0-471-01856-2
- ^ Het Parool, September 27, page 4–5. Concentration camps: where the Nazi's bring their ideals in practice, NIOD (Dutch Institute of War Documentation), Amsterdam
- ^ Het 'Illegale Parool'-archief 1940–1945 (4) and Het 'Illegale Parool'-archief 1940–1945 (5) (Het 'Illegale Parool'-archief 1940–1945, September 27, 1943, p 4–5)
- ISBN 0-8419-0910-5.
- ^ "Byłem Numerem: swiadectwa Z Auschwitz" by Kazimierz Piechowski, Eugenia Bozena Kodecka-Kaczynska, Michal Ziokowski, Hardcover, Wydawn. Siostr Loretanek, ISBN 8372571228
- ^ "Auschwitz-Birkenau – The Film about the Amazing Escape from Auschwitz—Now Available on DVD". En.auschwitz.org.pl. January 13, 2009. Retrieved July 31, 2010.
- ISBN 1-56980-232-7.
- ^ a b Linn, Ruth. "Rudolf Vrba", The Guardian, April 13, 2006.
- ^ The BBC first broadcast information from the report on June 18, not June 15, according to Ruth Linn in Escaping Auschwitz: A Culture of Forgetting, p. 28.
- ^ "Inquiry confirms Nazi death camps". The New York Times. July 3, 1944.
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(help) - ^ "Two death camps places of horror". The New York Times. July 0, 1944.
{{cite news}}
: Check date values in:|date=
(help) - ^ Max Frankel (November 14, 2001). "Turning Away from the Holocaust". The New York Times.
- ^ For the complete study by Dr. Leff, see Laurel, Leff. Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper. Cambridge University Press, 2006.
- ^ Laurel Leff. "How the NYT Missed the Story of the Holocaust While It Was Happening". George Mason University’s History News Network.
- ^ "Captured German sound recordings", The National Archives.
- ) using information from a series called Hefte von Auschwitz, and cited in Kárný, Miroslav. "The Vrba and Wetzler report", in Berenbaum, Michael & Gutman, Yisrael (eds). Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, p. 564, Indiana University Press and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1994. The original German is: "25. November Im KL Auschwitz II kommen 24 weibliche Häftlinge ums Leben, von denen 13 unmittelbar getötet werden."
- ^ Maps of the main death marches, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
- ISBN 0-06-019043-4. p. 649
- ^ Wiesel, Elie. Night, p. 81.
- ISBN 0-7566-2535-1.)
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link - ^ Holocaust: The events and their impact on real people, DK Publishing in conjunction with the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education, p. 146.
- ^ A film with scenes from the liberation of Dachau, Buchenwald, Belsen and other Nazi concentration camps, supervised by the British Ministry of Information and the American Office of War Information, was begun but never finished or shown. It lay in archives until first aired on PBS's Frontline on May 7, 1985. The film, partly edited by Alfred Hitchcock, can be seen online at Memory of the Camps.
- ^ Holocaust: The events and their impact on real people, DK Publishing in conjunction with the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education, p. 145.
- ^ "The 11th Armoured Division (Great Britain)", United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
- ^ "Bergen-Belsen", United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
- ^ Wiesel, Elie. After the Darkness: Reflections on the Holocaust, Schocken Books, p. 41.
- ^ "Liberation of Belsen", BBC News, April 15, 1945.
- ^ Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in Oświęcim, Poland.
- ^ a b c Dawidowicz, Lucy. The War Against the Jews, Bantam, 1986.p. 403
- ^ a b Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2006, p. 125.
- ^ a b 1.8–1.9 million non-Jewish Polish citizens are estimated to have died as a result of the Nazi occupation and the war. Estimates are from Polish scholar, Franciszek Piper, the chief historian at Auschwitz. Poles: Victims of the Nazi Era at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
- ^ a b c Piotrowski, Tadeusz. "Project InPosterum: Poland WWII Casualties", accessed March 15, 2007; and Łuczak, Czesław. "Szanse i trudności bilansu demograficznego Polski w latach 1939–1945", Dzieje Najnowsze, issue 1994/2.
- ^ "Sinti and Roma", United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). The USHMM places the scholarly estimates at 220,000–500,000. Michael Berenbaum in The World Must Know, also published by the USHMM, writes that "serious scholars estimate that between 90,000 and 220,000 were killed under German rule." (Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know", United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2006, p. 126.
- ^ "Romanies and the Holocaust: a Reevaluation and Overview". Radoc.net. Retrieved July 31, 2010.
- ^ Donna F. Ryan, John S. Schuchman, Deaf People in Hitler's Europe, Gallaudet University Press 2002, 62
- ^ a b "GrandLodgeScotland.com". GrandLodgeScotland.com. Retrieved July 31, 2010.
- Carinthian Slovene victims, nor Slovene victims from areas in present-day Italy and Croatia. These numbers are result of a 10 year long research by the Institute for Contemporary History (Inštitut za novejšo zgodovino) from Ljubljana, Slovenia. The partial results of the research have been released in 2008 in the volume Žrtve vojne in revolucije v Sloveniji (Ljubljana: Institute for Conetmporary History, 2008), and officially presented at the Slovenian National Council ([File:ttp://www.ds-rs.si/?q=publikacije/zborniki/Zrtve_vojne]). The volume is also available online: [File:http://www.ds-rs.si/dokumenti/publikacije/Zbornik_05-1.pdf]
- ^ a b c d e The Holocaust Chronicle, Publications International Ltd., p. 108.
- ^ a b Shulman, William L. A State of Terror: Germany 1933–1939. Bayside, New York: Holocaust Resource Center and Archives.
- ^ Gilbert, Martin. Atlas of the Holocaust, 1988, pp. 242–244.
- ^ Ian Dear, Michael Richard Daniell Foot (2001). The Oxford companion to World War II. Oxford University Press. p.341. ISBN 0198604467
- Nuremberg Trials and Eichmann's trial that at a meeting he had with Eichmann in Budapest in late August 1944, "Eichmann ... told me that, according to his information, some 6,000,000 (six million) Jews had perished until then – 4,000,000 (four million) in extermination camps and the remaining 2,000,000 (two million) through shooting by the Operations Units and other causes, such as disease, etc."[3][4][5]
- ^ Israel Gutman. Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Macmillan Reference Books; Reference edition (October 1, 1995.
- ^ a b "How many Jews were murdered in the Holocaust?"[dead link], FAQs about the Holocaust, Yad Vashem.
- ISBN 3-423-04690-2.
- ^ About: The Central Database of Shoah Victims Names, Yad Vashem web site.
- ^ Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews. Yale University Press, 2003, c. 1961).
- )
- ISBN 0-415-28145-8.
By the most exact estimates of recent research, the number of Jews killed in Europe between September 1939 and May 1945 was nearly six million. This estimate is a minimum; the deaths shown opposite total just over 5,750,000, and are based on such country-by-country and region-by-region records as survive.
- ^ ISBN 0-553-34302-5.p. 403
- ^ Shoah Research Center;– Albania [6] The Jews of Albania during the Zogist and Second World War Periods [7] and see also Norman H. Gershman's book Besa: Muslims Who Saved Jews in World War II – for reviews etc [8] (all consulted June 24, 2010)
- ^ The Destruction of the European Jews – Revised and Definite Edition 1985, Holmes and Meier Publishers, Inc. Table B-3, p. 1220
- ^ Reszka, Paweł (December 23, 2005). "Majdanek Victims Enumerated. Changes in the history textbooks?". Gazeta Wyborcza. Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Retrieved April 13, 2010.
- ISBN 0-375-40900-9.
- ISBN 0-231-11214-9.pp. 152–153
- ^ Jacobs, Neil G. Yiddish: a Linguistic Introduction, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005, ISBN 0-521-77215-X.
- ^ Solomo Birnbaum, Grammatik der jiddischen Sprache (4., erg. Aufl., Hamburg: Buske, 1984), p. 3.
- ^ Dietrich Eichholtz "»Generalplan Ost« zur Versklavung osteuropäischer Völker"[9]
- ^ Madajczyk, Czesław. "Die Besatzungssysteme der Achsenmächte. Versuch einer komparatistischen Analyse." Studia Historiae Oeconomicae vol. 14 (1980): pp. 105–122 Google Books in Hitler's War in the East, 1941–1945: A Critical Assessment by Gerd R. Uebersch̀ear and Rolf-Dieter Müller Amazon.com
- ^ David Cesarani. Holocaust: From the persecution of the Jews to mass murder, Routledge. 2004 p.366. ISBN 0415275113
- ^ German peopleinto the distant future, and everywhere rob us of all understanding, not least in that neighbouring peoples would have to reckon at some appropriate time, with a similar fate'. Later versions of the 'General Plan East' grew more expansive, and envisioned serial genocide and the death or deportation of the 30 to 40 million 'racially undesirable' peoples like the Poles and Jews from the area to be colonized in the east. A second group of about 14 million, mainly Slavs, would stay to be used as slaves. Germans and others from 'Germanic nations', like the Norwegians and the Dutch, would settle the new territory.
- ^ Berghahn, Volker R. (1999). "Germans and Poles 1871–1945". Germany and Eastern Europe: Cultural Identities and Cultural Differences. Rodopi.
- ISBN 0-231-05351-7.
- ^ Israel Gutman, Unequal Victims Holocaust Library 1985
- ^ ISBN 0-7864-0371-3.
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(help) See also review - ^ Nurowski, Roman. 1939–1945 War Losses in Poland, Warsaw 1960,
- ^ Poland-World War II-casualties, Piotrowski, Tadeusz. "Project InPosterum: Poland WWII Casualties"
- ^ Polska 1939–1945. Straty osobowe i ofiary represji pod dwiema okupacjami, ed. Tomasz Szarota and Wojciech Materski, Warszawa, IPN 2009, ISBN 978-83-7629-067-6 (Introduction reproduced here)
- ^ Žerjavić, VladimirYugoslavia manipulations with the number Second World War victims, Zagreb: Croatian Information center,1993 ISBN 0-919817-32-7 HIC.hr and Vojska.net
- ^ Kočović,Bogoljub-Žrtve Drugog svetskog rata u Jugoslaviji 1990 ISBN 8601019285
- ^ Tomasevich, Jozo. War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945: Occupation and Collaboration. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. ISBN 0804736154
- ^ a b www.ds-rs.si/dokumenti/publikacije/Zbornik_05-1.pdf
- ^ United States Holocaust Memorial Museum – Holocaust Era in Croatia: 1941–1945, Jasenovac (go to section III Concentration Camps) USHMM.org
- ^ United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Holocaust Encyclopedia. Jasenovac USHMN.org
- ^ JewishVirtualLibrary.org, Jasenovac
- ^ "Croatia" (PDF). Shoah Resource Center, The International School for Holocaust Studies. Yad Vashem.
- ^ *Bosniaks in Jasenovac Concentration Camp—Congress of Bosniak Intellectuals, Sarajevo. ISBN 9789958471025. October 2006. (Holocaust Studies)
- ^ of Bosniak victims of Jasenovac[dead link] Template:Bs icon Meliha Pihura, Bosnjaci.net Magazine, April 13, 2007.
- ^ Timothy Snyder (2010). "Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin". Basic Books. p.416. ISBN 0465002390
- ^ The Russian Academy of Science Rossiiskaia Akademiia nauk. Liudskie poteri SSSR v period vtoroi mirovoi voiny:sbornik statei. Sankt-Peterburg 1995 ISBN 5-86789-023-6
- ^ Vadim Erlikman. Poteri narodonaseleniia v XX veke: spravochnik. Moscow 2004. ISBN 5-93165-107-1
- ^ Lucy S. Dawidowicz. The Holocaust and the historians. Harvard University Press, 1983, p.10 ISBN 0674405676
- ^ "Soviet Prisoners of war".
- ^ "Nazi persecution of Soviet Prisoners of War".
- ^ Kermish, Joseph. (ed.) Template:PDFlink,, Yad Vashem Studies VII, Jerusalem 1968, pp. 177–178.
- ^ a b Niewyk, Donald & Nicosia, Frances. "The Gypsies", The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust, p. 47.
- ^ "We had the same pain", The Guardian, November 29, 2004.
- ^ Bauer, Yehuda. "Gypsies", in Berenbaum, Michael & Gutman, Yisrael (eds). Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. Indiana University Press and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (1994); this edition 1998, p. 453.
- ^ See History of the Holocaust: a Handbook and a Dictionary, Edelheit, Edelheit & Edelheit, p.458, Free Press, 1995
- ^ Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2006, p. 126.
- ^ cited in Re. Holocaust Victim Assets Litigation (Swiss Banks) Special Master's Proposals, September 11, 2000.
- ^ "Sinti and Roma", United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
- ISBN 0415281458. (ref Map 182 p 141 with Romani deaths by country & Map 301 p 232) Note: formerly The Dent Atlas of the Holocaust; 1982, 1993.
- ^ Hanock, Ian. "Romanies and the Holocaust: A Reevaluation and an Overview"[dead link] , published in Stone, D. (ed.) (2004) The Historiography of the Holocaust. Palgrave, Basingstoke and New York.
- ^ Hancock, Ian. Jewish Responses to the Porajmos (The Romani Holocaust), Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, University of Minnesota.
- ^ Helen Fein, Accounting for Genocide, New York, The Free Press, 1979, pp.79, 105
- ^ Breitman, Richard. Himmler and the Final Solution: The Architect of Genocide. Random House, 2004.
- ^ Bauer, Yehuda. "Gypsies", in Berenbaum, Michael & Gutman, Yisrael (eds). Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. Indiana University Press and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (1994); this edition 1998, p. 444.
- ^ Bauer, Yehuda. "Gypsies", in Berenbaum, Michael & Gutman, Yisrael (eds). Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. Indiana University Press and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (1994); this edition 1998, p. 445.
- ^ Bauer, Yehuda. "Gypsies", in Berenbaum, Michael & Gutman, Yisrael (eds). Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. Indiana University Press and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (1994); this edition 1998, p. 446.
- ^ [10] Anne Frank Guide, Black people in Nazi Germany
- ^ a b [11] Voice Online, Feb 16, 2009 issue 1359, The forgotten black victims of Nazi Germany
- ^ The word translated here as "fellow German" is Volksgenosse, a term used by the Nazis to signify pure German blood. The Nationalsozialistischen Deutschen Arbeiterpartei 1920 manifesto stated: "Staatsbürger kann nur sein, wer Volksgenosse ist. Volksgenosse kann nur sein, wer deutschen Blutes ist, ohne Rücksichtnahme auf die Konfession. Kein Jude kann daher Volksgenosse sein." (A "citizen must be Volksgenosse. Volksgenosse must be of German blood, without regard to religious affiliation. No Jew can therefore be Volksgenosse.")
- NSDAP.
- ^ Holocaust Remembrance Network.
- ^ Kershaw, Ian. Hitler, volume II, Norton 2000, p. 430.
- ^ a b Lifton, Robert J. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. London: Papermac, 1986 (reprinted 1990) p. 142.
- ^ Neugebauer, Wolfgang. "Racial Hygiene in Vienna 1938", Wiener Klinische Wochenschrift, special edition, March 1998.
- ^ Rael D Strous (2007) Psychiatry during the Nazi era: ethical lessons for the modern professional Annals of General Psychiatry 2007, 6:8doi:10.1186/1744-859X-6-8
- ^ Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, Basic Books 1986
- ^ Sereny, Gitta. Into That Darkness, Pimlico 1974, p. 48.
- ^ a b c d Steakley, James. "Homosexuals and the Third Reich", The Body Politic, Issue 11, January/February 1974.
- ISBN 9783593377490.
- ^ "Non-Jewish victims of Nazism", Encyclopædia Britannica.
- ^ Giles, Geoffrey J. "The Most Unkindest Cut of All': Castration, Homosexuality and Nazi Justice", Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 27, No. 1, (January 1992): pp. 41–61.
- ^ Non-Jewish Resistance, Holocaust Encyclopedia, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.
- ^ "Horrors of Auschwitz", Newsquest Media Group Newspapers, January 27, 2005
- ^ Augustine, Dolores, Book Review of Niven, Bill, The Buchenwald Child: Truth, Fiction, and Propaganda in Central European History 41:01, Cambridge University Press
- ^ Brown, Maggie. "The war that time forgot". The Guardian, October 5, 1999. Retrieved December 27, 2009.
- ^ "Commissar Order". Ushmm.org. Retrieved July 31, 2010.
- ^ Peter Hitchens, The Gathering Storm, April 9, 2008
- ^ Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf, pp. 315 and 320.
- ^ Katz, Jews and Freemasons in Europe cited in The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, volume 2, page 531.
- ^ United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Freemasonry under the Nazi Regime
- ^ Persecution and Resistance of Jehovah's Witnesses During the Nazi-Regime 1933–1945 Social Disinterest, Governmental Disinformation, Renewed Persecution, and Now Manipulation of History? p. 251.
- ^ Dr. Simon Samuels, "Applying the Lessons of the Holocaust" in Is the Holocaust Unique? edited by Alan S. Rosenbaum, Boulder, Colorado, Westview Press, 2001, p. 209.
- ^ Genocide: a Comprehensive Introduction 2nd edition, page 254, Routledge, Oxford, 2010
- )
- ISBN 978-3492041195.
- ISBN 978-0-415-77757-5.
- ISBN 1-85984-773-0.
Further reading
- External links, references, and other resources are listed at Holocaust (resources).